Lee Chang-dong's first film in eight years gets a limited US theatrical run before streaming globally, fresh off a Venice win and South Korea's Oscar submission.
Netflix put out the final trailer for Possible Love on Wednesday, and with it came the release calendar everyone's been waiting on. The film gets a limited theatrical run in select US cinemas starting October 23, 2026, before it lands on Netflix worldwide on November 6.
This is Lee Chang-dong's first feature in eight years. His last was Burning, back in 2018, and before that came Secret Sunshine and Poetry, films built around people quietly coming apart. Possible Love follows the same instinct, this time through two married couples whose lives collide.
The trailer opens on Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, singing All I Know Is Love and looking cheerful enough until the cracks show. She starts hinting that her husband Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, is hiding something. He's recently lost his job as a welder, and that loss pulls at seams in the marriage that were already fraying.
Then there's Ye-ji, a wealthy documentary filmmaker played by Cho Yeo-jeong, married to Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung. When Ye-ji starts filming a documentary on laid-off workers, Mi-ok ends up in front of her camera, and the two women grow close. Too close, maybe, because Mi-ok can't quite hide her discomfort watching Ye-ji and her own husband get friendly. A shared summer holiday brings both couples into the same room, and nobody walks out of it with their secrets intact.
What the festival run says about it
Possible Love isn't arriving cold. It picked up the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice this year, and the Korean Association of Film Critics named it Film of the Year, with Jeon Do-yeon taking the group's Best Actress award. The Korean Film Council has since put it forward as the country's official submission for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards.
Jung Jae-il, who scored Parasite and Squid Game, handles the music here, and Lee co-wrote the screenplay with Oh Jung-mi.
For Netflix, this is another prestige acquisition running the same playbook as past Korean awards contenders, a brief theatrical window to qualify and build buzz, then a wide drop once the festival chatter has done its job. Whether Possible Love actually makes the Oscar shortlist won't be known for a while yet. But with Venice silverware already in hand and a director whose name alone gets arthouse audiences talking, it's entered the conversation on stronger footing than most submissions do.
The real test comes once subtitles reach a global audience on November 6. Festival juries are one thing. A Friday on the world's biggest streaming service is another.
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