When Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" made its world premiere in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival Sunday, the reaction was swift.
After the credits rolled at the Sala Grande, a standing ovation reportedly lasted for over six minutes before staff had to clear the theater for the next screening. More impressive were the reviews that came out the same day, which were nearly uniform in their praise.
The film, Lee's first since "Burning" in 2018 and his seventh in three decades, was an unlikely project from the outset -- a nearly three-hour, novelistic drama about two married couples on the opposite end of a class divide, bankrolled by Netflix. It is a rare art house bet for a streamer better known for bingeable fare, as well as the first film the director has made for the platform after he couldn't find backers for a theatrical release.
Sul Kyung-gu and Jeon Do-yeon, who have both worked with Lee before, play the laid off welder and his wife, respectively. Cho Yeo-jeong, known for portraying the rich mom in "Parasite," plays a documentary filmmaker who sets out to film the couple; Zo In-sung is her wealthy husband.
Critics praised the performances of all four leads and the patience with which Lee builds the story over the 164 minute runtime. Variety called it a "beautifully mature, quietly colossal relationship drama," The Hollywood Reporter a "quiet powerhouse." Vulture's Bilge Ebiri suggested it might be the most powerful film of Lee's career.
For Lee, this marks a return to the festival circuit after the long hiatus after "Burning." That film won the critics' prize at Cannes and was among the best-reviewed films of the year.
A novelist and former high school teacher who only started making films in his 40s, the 72-year-old has built a devoted following among cinephiles worldwide for his brand of spare, closely observed dramas about ordinary people under strain.
The last time Lee competed at Venice was 2002, when he took the Silver Lion for best director with "Oasis." Should he win the Golden Lion this time, it would be the second Korean film to do so, after Kim Ki-duk's "Pieta" in 2012.
At a press conference Sunday livestreamed on the festival's YouTube channel, Lee spoke about how much had changed in the years since his last film.
"There was the pandemic, a time when people couldn't come to theaters," he said. "Beyond that, I felt human relationships were fundamentally changing. I kept asking what kind of power a film can still have, whether it can still connect one person to another."
Founded in 1932, the Venice International Film Festival is the oldest of its kind and generally seen as second in stature only to Cannes. It has also been more open to films from streaming platforms than Cannes, which has kept Netflix productions out of its competition since 2018.
In recent years the festival has come to be seen as a launchpad for the Oscars, as Golden Lion winners "The Shape of Water" (2017), "Nomadland" (2020) and "Poor Things" (2023) all went on major awards runs. But the jury has also gone for smaller films that had flown under the radar, including Jim Jarmusch's three-part family drama "Father Mother Sister Brother" in 2025.
This year's lineup is especially heavy on politics; artistic director Alberto Barbera called it the festival's "most political ever." The 21 films in competition touch on a right-wing media mogul, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, authoritarian rule across the former Soviet bloc and growing wealth inequality, among other subjects.
Widely regarded as the favorite is Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine," a dark comedy starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA agents on Easter Island in the run-up to the US-backed coup in Chile in 1973.
Lee is not particularly known as a political filmmaker. But his sympathies have always been with people on the losing end, and "Possible Love," set against mass layoffs and a strike put down by force, carries a political charge of its own. Early reviews describe a film that shows what money buys and what it spares the rich without pointing fingers.
"Since my days writing novels, I've kept asking how close I really stood to the people I wrote about," Lee said Sunday, adding that the documentary filmmaker in the story is the character closest to himself. "That question hasn't left me."
The Golden Lion and other competition prizes will be announced Sept. 12. "Possible Love" opens in Korean theaters on Sept. 23 and in the US on Oct. 23. It launches globally on Netflix on Nov. 6.
