Why Korean films keep winning over Europe and the US, from Parasite to Possible Love

Another year, another Korean film topping the critics' lists. This time it's Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong, and it is already being called one of the best films of 2026.

South Korea has just submitted it for the Oscar for Best International Feature. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

What is Possible Love about?

It's a quiet social drama about two couples from opposite worlds. One is working class: welder Choi Ho-seok and his wife Ahn Mi-ok, a mask seamstress. The other is wealthy: documentary maker Lee Ye-ji and her husband Han Sang-woo, a private investor who drives a Porsche.

They meet because Ye-ji wants to film a documentary about an auto-industry workers' strike. That strike cost Ho-seok his job, so she decides he should be the star.

Critics are thrilled. Die Zeit, a German weekly, called it "another sensation from South Korea". Rolling Stone went with "the best film of the year". German critic Wolfgang M. Schmitt reads it as Karl Marx's theory of surplus value for today: the rich filmmaker, he says, skims off the workers' feelings "to sell the film afterwards".

Is this a Korean takeover?

"Possible Love" is the third much-praised Korean film of 2026. Before it came Park Chan-wook's working-class drama "No Other Choice" and Na Hong-jin's monster thriller "Hope", which drew more than four million viewers worldwide.

Cultural scholar Sulgi Lie of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf wouldn't call it a takeover. Directors like Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong get lots of attention in the West, he says, but Korean cinema is more diverse than that.

Why does it work abroad?

South Korea has the world's fifth-largest cinema market, with an estimated 150 million cinema visits a year. Lie sees a boom in Europe and the US, especially since "Parasite" won Best Picture in 2020, the first Korean film to do so. The New York Times then ranked it the best film of the 21st century in 2025.

He points to the country's history. South Korea shot from farming-based developing country to "turbo-capitalism" in no time, so class contradictions end up on screen. Many top directors were politicised by the democracy movement of the 1980s, when the country was still a military dictatorship.

K-pop's success helped too. And Korean filmmakers have long looked to Hollywood, which makes their work easier for Western audiences to connect with. In Lie's words: "The American models are Koreanised, but the Koreanised form spreads globally again." Netflix hit "Squid Game" is his best example.

Where can you watch it?

Some cinemas are showing "Possible Love", and you'll also find it on Netflix.