Director Park Chan-Wook has such iconic Korean films as Old Boy and The Handmaiden in his list of credits; and for this latest, a Korean detective-noir psychological thriller, Decision to Leave earned him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. While ostensibly described as a police procedural, at the heart of this film is a romance - a love story of forbidden, restrained, even chaste, love. And it’s perhaps this very purity of it that makes it such a transfixing tale.
Park Hei-Il portrays the Busan detective, whose sleepless nights has him volunteering for stakeouts. His wife works in an Ipo hospital and he visits her every weekend. He has a fellow police officer, and this sidekick provides much of the humor at the start of the film. It’s when a man is found dead at the base of a local, popular mountain that the plot thickens. The widow of this expired businessman/climber is played by Taiwan star Tang Wei, and she makes use of this non-Korean aspect to project a woman who’s different, possibly not to be trusted.
As the narrative develops, it would seem that this wife has a shadier past than her daytime work as a caregiver for old folks would suggest. She seems to take her husband’s death too nonchalantly, and inconsistencies in the story of where she was on the day of the ‘accident’ crops up. But while practically everyone in the force has grown dubious of her alibi and have deep suspicions about her, our protagonist detective has become infatuated and mesmerized by her.
It’s in the control of the material, how each sequence adds a layer of doubt, mystery, or confirmation that makes this film such a compelling watch. To his credit, Chan-Wook never spells things out, trusting in the intelligence of the audience, and allowing us to convince ourselves on whether she is guilty or not, or whether the detective is being foolish or not - and ultimately, if there’s genuine love between the two, or something more calculated, devious, pathetic, or plain foolish.
To say much more about the plot developments would only take away the pleasure of discovery one undertakes when watching a film such as this. There are moments, and camera work, when the film may remind you of 7even or other David Fincher films, but the big difference here is that it’s the romance that’s firmly at the center of this film. We’re asked to observe, dissect, critique, and ultimately, empathize, with these two never-to-be lovers.
Decision to Leave is showing exclusively this weekend at selected Ayala Cinemas as part of a South Korea film festival. Hope it’ll enjoy a regular run soon, and you get to appreciate why it’s been sent as South Korea’s official entry to the Academy Awards of 2023. I don’t think it’ll duplicate the success of Parasite, but it is definitely worth watching.