NYFF64 Diary, Day 2 ~ More TK @ da Movies

It's a testament to how good Lee Chang-dong is at this whole "making a movie" thing that even a major (and, mercifully, temporary) audio issue at Alice Tully Hall didn't detract from the work.

In his first feature since 2018's Burning, Lee charts the journey of Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), her husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and their neurodivergent son after a corporate restructuring upends their lives. Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) a rich documentary filmmaker and her idle generational-wealth-possessing husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) become intertwined after Ye-ji’s newest project begins profiling the recently laid-off workers of the nebulous heavy-industry firm that Ho-seok used to work for.

It's gorgeous, for starters—a visually quotidian masterpiece, to be sure, easily blending purported cell phone footage or naturalistic pseudo-documentary interview footage with third-person omniscient shooting. The film has this deeply naturalistic portrayal of the inevitable rending of interpersonal relationships under capitalism—and, especially, how those relationships get turned into these widening gyres of expectation and desire and distaste. Cho Yeo-jeong’s exploitation of this family in Possible Love is not so explicit as, say, Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite literally calling her poorer orbiters smelly, but there’s still a sense that she's doing some kind of kindness to these little people around her, telling the heartrending story of these downtrodden unfortunate miscreants cast out of the labor force by people like her and her husband.

But so much of this movie is anchored to Jeon Do-yeon's performance as Mi-ok, in her exhausted radical support of her damaged husband and distant son, in the way she looks at Ye-ji's life—her designer bags, her designer clothes, her designer husband—and sees in them things that she wants to have but in some way knows she can't. Mi-ok is willing to trick herself into believing that this documentarian and her nebulously-wealthy paramour are, in fact, interested in her, if only to keep the idea of them around for as long as possible. They can smoke cigarettes together, and get drunk, and be happy, and in that way be fulfilled.

And yet I wanted more from the film, I think. Even beyond the look of the thing (gorgeous) and the story's political aims (astute, activist-oriented, but demurred by the age and pain of the protagonists) I felt some tug of wanting more. Maybe it's an unfair comparison to bring up No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook's outing from last year's NYFF, which features a similarly-situated protagonist with nearly-identical feelings of loss and alienation, but (because it's Park) also has a lot more action and humor and bitterness to work through than Director Lee's muted late-capitalist realism. Is that maybe an insane thing to demand, for a movie to take its perfectly naturalistic and realist characters and put them in some kind of more active situation just so I can kick my feet and giggle a little? Yes! The film creates a bunch of guys and then puts them in circumstances and then those guys respond the way those circumstances would dictate, and that’s so so fucking hard to do, and even harder to do well, and yet I’m left sitting here like a greedy child asking for more—more plot, more zags, more stakes, more something.

More TK,
Luis

Photo by Joo Jae-bum/Netflix © 2026

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