Lee Chang-dong's first feature since the 2018 thriller "Burning" is "Possible Love," a film that treats capitalism's cruelty as a labor crisis and then asks who has the right to tell that story, NPR's review said.
The film opens at the funeral of a man who had worked at a Korean automaking plant. In the previous two years the company has gone through a restructuring and mass layoffs, devastating the community, and the man died by suicide. In reluctant attendance is Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, a colleague and union member still carrying the weight of the cuts and an unsuccessful workers' strike. His marriage to Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, is visibly strained. An argument about Ho-seok's drinking catches the eye of Ye-ji, played by Cho Yeo-jeong, a documentarian making a film about the "vanishing laborer." She quickly decides the couple would make ideal subjects and begins inserting herself into their lives, to Ho-seok's annoyance. He at first refuses to be interviewed, and he is also refusing therapy despite Mi-ok's pleas.
NPR's critic wrote that the film "slowly burns off of a mixture of tonalities," melodramatic at times, grounded at others, and sometimes bleakly funny. Lee and co-writer Oh Jung-mi, the review said, are interested in the ties between work and self-worth, and in the guilt and shame that follow when that meaning is stripped away.
It is also an upstairs-downstairs story. Ye-ji is "the rare documentarian who can actually afford being a documentarian," the review said; her husband, Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung, is a wealthy international businessman, and they own multiple homes. Cho, whom many viewers will recognize as the wealthy matriarch in "Parasite," plays Ye-ji as someone whose personal, moral and artistic aims are in constant conflict. The way her eyes light up when Mi-ok or Ho-seok is especially vulnerable — a "perfect cinematic moment," in the review's phrase — is both understandable and off-putting. Her wish to give voice to the working class sits in awkward tension with her subjects, no matter how hard she tries to befriend them as equals.
That tension is the film's real subject, more than a simple eat-the-rich fable. NPR noted that recent years have produced many stories about the wealth gap, but fewer that linger on job insecurity and how it rearranges a family. "Possible Love" uses the documentarian's camera as a second form of power: Ye-ji has money, time, and the ability to decide which private moments become public narrative.
Lee has not rushed back to the screen. Eight years after "Burning," he has made a film that is as much about storytelling ethics as it is about a failed strike. Whether audiences embrace its tonal shifts, the review suggests, will depend on whether they want a labor story that also interrogates the person holding the camera.