Possible Love: The Venice Ovation, and When It Hits Netflix
By the time the credits finished rolling in Venice's Sala Grande on the evening of September 6, half the cast of Possible Love was already crying. They hugged each other, wiped their eyes with napkins, and let the ovation run six and a half minutes, according to Deadline. It was already September 7 in Seoul by the time that applause died down.
That's the reception Lee Chang-dong got for his first film in eight years. Unlike most of what plays the Venice competition, this one lands on Netflix worldwide before the year is out.
Why the Eight-Year Gap Matters
Lee Chang-dong hasn't made a film since Burning in 2018, and before that came Poetry, Secret Sunshine, Oasis, and Peppermint Candy — a run that made him one of the two or three Korean directors international critics reach for first when the conversation turns serious. He doesn't work fast by design, and eight years is a long wait even by his own pace. Possible Love reunites him with Sul Kyung-gu, who led Peppermint Candy and Oasis, alongside Jeon Do-yeon, who became the first Korean actor to win an acting prize at Cannes for Lee's Secret Sunshine back in 2007. Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong round out the cast as the film's other couple.
If you only know Korean film through Parasite or the Netflix survival-show wave, this is a different lane. No genre hook, no twist ending. Just two marriages colliding over 164 minutes.
Venice isn't new territory for him, either. Lee won the Silver Lion for best director there in 2002 for Oasis, so Sunday's premiere put him back in the same competition slate 24 years later. Between films, he spent a stretch away from directing entirely: he served as South Korea's Minister of Culture and Tourism from 2003 to 2004, under President Roh Moo-hyun. That's not a resume line most directors carry into a comeback, and it's part of why Korean outlets are treating this premiere as more than a routine festival stop.
What Possible Love Is About
Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) are barely holding their household together when a funeral pulls them into the orbit of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker chronicling workers like Ho-seok, and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), whose money and comfort sit in sharp contrast to everything Mi-ok and Ho-seok are dealing with. Ye-ji's documentary becomes the excuse for the two couples to keep circling each other. Netflix's own announcement calls it one of the biggest ensembles of Korean acting talent assembled for a single film, which, given the four names involved, isn't an exaggeration.
The trailer plays it close to the chest, which tracks with how Lee has always worked. The tension comes from what these four people don't say to each other, not from a plot twist waiting to land.
The other two names in that cast are worth a second look if you skipped past them. Zo In-sung has been a fixture of Korean television for two decades, most recently topping Disney+'s Moving in 2023, and Cho Yeo-jeong is the actor global audiences already know as the Park family's mother in Parasite, which makes her one of two people in this cast whose face a lot of international viewers will recognize before they've even clocked the title.
The Reviews Are Almost Too Consistent to Be a Fluke
Eleven reviews are in on Metacritic as of this posting, and every single one of them is positive: a 96 Metascore, tagged "universal acclaim." That's a rare number even for a Venice competition title. The South China Morning Post's review, headlined "Burning director Lee Chang-dong back with another masterpiece," gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars.
None of that guarantees an Oscar. But South Korea has already picked Possible Love as its official submission for Best International Feature at next year's Academy Awards, and the Korean Film Council's selection committee specifically praised its "cinematic completeness" and "excellent mise-en-scene" when it made that call back in August, weeks before a single Venice review had run. Reviews landing this clean right out of the gate matters for how far the campaign travels from here.
It also matters that this isn't a small string of reviews from festival regulars nobody outside film-critic circles reads. Outlets covering the premiere include Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, TheWrap, and the South China Morning Post, meaning the acclaim is showing up in the same trade press that studios watch when deciding how hard to push an awards campaign.
If you loved Burning for how little it explained, know going in that the general read across these reviews is a more direct, less ambiguous film. Still slow. Still built on what people won't say out loud.
Where and When You'll Be Able to See It
Here's the part that changes what you do this fall: Possible Love isn't a Netflix-only release, and the theatrical window comes first almost everywhere.
South Korea gets it in theaters September 23, Australia on October 22, and the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Japan follow on October 23, per Netflix's release announcement. If you're not near a theater playing it, November 6 is the date to mark down.
That six-week gap is worth planning around if the Oscar conversation matters to you specifically. Films picking up festival momentum in September routinely lose some of that noise by the time a wider audience finally gets to see them two months later. A three-hour drama about class resentment isn't going to out-market a comeback teaser or a survival-show finale, no matter how many critics love it right now.
It's also a different release pattern than most of what this blog usually covers. Netflix's Korean drama series typically premiere the same day worldwide, straight to the app, no theater required. Possible Love is following the older awards-season playbook instead: festival, then limited theaters, then streaming last. If you're used to a new K-drama simply appearing in your queue on a Friday, the wait here is the trade-off for a title Netflix is positioning for the Oscars rather than for a weekend binge.
Sources differ slightly on the exact ovation length: Variety clocked it at six minutes, Deadline at six and a half. Every account agrees it ran long enough that the cast had time to cry through it before the lights came up. That's the reaction Lee Chang-dong's films have earned before, and it's the strongest sign yet that the acclaim from Venice is going to hold up once the festival crowd goes home.
If your November watchlist is still empty, put this one on it now, before the six-week wait makes you forget it happened. Set a calendar reminder for November 6 if that's what it takes, because nothing about this rollout is designed to keep it top of mind between now and then the way a same-day drama drop would.
This is a running news series, not a one-off post — new stories go up twice a day, roughly 7am and 7pm Korea time.
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