Decision to Leave
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Running time: 2hr18 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Tang Wei in Decision to Leave
At the foot of a mountain just outside Busan, a man’s body is found flung from the picturesque peak above — clad in hiking gear, beset with flies. A fall, a jump or a push? By-the-book police inspector Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) isn’t too sure, but he’s intrigued by the cool composure of the dead man’s young, beautiful wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei) in response to her sudden widowhood, and not just for investigative purposes; almost immediately, the married detective finds himself romantically drawn to this most obvious of suspects, she returns his interest in kind, and things get messier and sexier from there.
I begin with an essential synopsis of Decision to Leave — a languid, thorny, richly alluring new film noir workout from Korean genre master Park Chan-wook — because it is in itself a kind of red herring. Written down in such terms, Park’s first film in six years sounds frankly hackneyed, recycling a plot shopworn from such past iterations as Out of the Past, Body Heat and Basic Instinct — and that’s before we get to the B-movie library. So why does this one feel so fresh, so slinky, so genuinely unpredictable even as we recognise the rules of the game? Put it down to emotions, not always the most essential component of a hardboiled murder-mystery, but the subtle secret weapon of this one: ornately and ingeniously plotted as it is, Decision to Leave is a wary, wounded love story first and a procedural puzzle second, powered by what seems a sincerely soulful attraction between two people who know nothing — but somehow see everything — of each other.
In an earlier phase of his career, Park (the sometime provocateur behind Oldboy and The Handmaiden) might have made this as an overtly erotic thriller, but the tense, quivering restraint of Decision to Leave is perhaps the most shocking thing about it. Nobody gets naked, yet the onscreen chemistry between Park Hae-il and Tang Wei — the latter lithely changeable and bewitching in her best role since a stunning breakout 15 years ago in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution — couldn’t be more charged. Little blood is shed on screen, yet latent violence aggravates proceedings like a pileup of paper cuts. Park’s last project was a chic, elegantly spiralled TV adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl for the BBC, and he seems to have carried some of that unlikely project’s moody discipline back to his home turf. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, Decision to Leave is densely plotty, yet it’s never the plot you’re thinking about. Instead, it’s the long, loaded gazes, gestures and conversations of an unworkable romance, played and replayed in memory, that we scrutinise for clues to the mystery — not so much of one man’s death, but of all our drifting, forlorn lives.
DECISION TO LEAVE (2022) Written by Park Chan-wook and Chung Seo-kyung | Shot by Kim Ji-yong | Edited by Kim Sang-bum