4.5/5 stars“Thou shalt not covet,” reads a title card at the beginning of Lee Chang-dong’s much-anticipated new film, Possible Love – alluding to the title of the 10th part of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s epic Dekalog. But covet what exactly?While Lee’s complex, nuanced drama features a modicum of sexual tension and a soupçon of envy, it goes much deeper. Issues of class and wealth bounce around like frenzied atoms in the Korean filmmaker’s first feature since his award-winning 2018 psychological thriller Burning.Possible Love, which is playing in competition at this year’s Venice International Film Festival before its autumn release via Netflix, has already been selected as South Korea’s official entry in the Academy Award race for best international feature. By putting two very different marriages under the microscope, it proves it will be hard to beat.Possible Love | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon, the star of Lee’s Secret Sunshine), who was born to a junk-dealer father and a mother who worked at a car wash, lives with her husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, from Lee’s Peppermint Candy and Oasis) and their son Cheol.Ho-seok was laid off from his factory job, and this trauma has left him scarred in ways that only become apparent as the story unfolds. Already struggling with alcohol, he admits to feeling “like a dead phantom … no reason to go on living”.