SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | Park Chan-wook |
|---|---|
| Country | South Korea |
| Year | 2022 |
Decision to Leave is a seductive, intricately constructed thriller from Park Chan-wook, a filmmaker whose command of mood, image and emotional ambiguity has few equals. After the grand theatricality of earlier work, Park turns here to a more sinuously controlled form of noir, one that coils itself around a detective story before revealing its true shape as a tale of romantic obsession. The result is a film that is both needlepoint precise and dreamily disorienting, a story that unfolds with the logic of insomnia, where waking life feels like a movie and every gesture carries a double meaning.
The plot begins with a body at the foot of a mountain. A climber has fallen to his death, and detective Hae-jun, played by Park Hae-il, is assigned to the case. The investigation takes him from the base of the peak to its summit, a literal ascent that hints at the film’s kinship with Vertigo, one of several classic thrillers whose influence ripples through Park’s work without ever tipping into pastiche. The dead man’s phone, half shattered, becomes a trove of clues. Park uses apps, messages and digital fragments with the same elegance that Coppola once brought to tapes and wiretaps in The Conversation.
The dead man’s widow, Seo-rae, played by Tang Wei, is the gravitational centre of the film. She is a Chinese immigrant who works as a caregiver, loved by the elderly people she tends. Her personal history, including her grandfather’s role in Korea’s resistance to Japan, moves Hae-jun, who is already struggling with insomnia and a marriage that has settled into a polite distance. Seo-rae’s dignity, reserve and intelligence captivate him. She is magnetic without being overtly seductive, and the emotional wound she carries is never fully articulated, which only deepens her mystery.
As the circumstantial evidence against her mounts, Hae-jun finds himself drawn into a relationship that is never quite spoken aloud. Suspicion and desire coexist in the same glance. Park understands that watching two people cook together can be more intimate, and more dangerous, than watching them in bed. The film’s erotic charge lies in what is withheld, in the way thoughts of Seo-rae intrude on Hae-jun’s mind even when he is with his wife. Their encounters have a pain-pleasure balance that recalls the director’s fascination with the darker impulses of the human soul, explored in earlier works like The Handmaiden.
The film’s style is both playful and exacting. Park’s camera is gleefully unpredictable, at one point adopting the point of view of a dead fish’s eye. Rooftop chases fizz with invention. A beach filled with snapping turtles offers a flash of mad comedy. The cinematography is layered with mirror images and visual echoes, suggesting that truth is slippery and hard to pin down. The score nods to Bernard Herrmann’s collaborations with Hitchcock, but the vision is unmistakably Park’s.
The narrative keeps the viewer off balance. New characters and developments appear without warning, forcing us to reassess what we think we know. Hae-jun’s moral compass wavers as he contemplates covering up for Seo-rae. Is she who she claims to be. Is he. The script refuses to offer easy answers. Instead, it builds toward an ending of extraordinary emotional force, the kind that leaves the audience reeling and compels a mental rewind through everything that came before.
Decision to Leave is a gorgeously made picture, a noir romance that explores the moment when duty falters, when desire overwhelms reason, and when the heart makes its own dangerous calculations. Tang Wei’s performance is magnificent, and Park Chan-wook’s direction is at his most slinky, inventive and assured. It is a film that lingers, like a dream half remembered, or a decision that cannot be undone.
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