Sophia Michaels
If you know the work of Park Chan-wook — key member of the Korean New Wave, cinematic agent provocateur, architect of the greatest hammer fight sequence ever and the closest thing to a K-Pop Brian De Palma we’re likely to be blessed with in this lifetime — then you know this is a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of high style. His motto seems to be that if it’s baroque, don’t fix it; from his “Vengeance Trilogy” onward, he’s given us dizzying, punch-drunk examples of genre movies and melodramas dosed with liberal amounts of sex, violence and swooping, swirling camera shots. Even his 2018 take on The Little Drummer Girl turns a miniseries adaptation of a John Le Carre novel into an espionage hall of mirrors, with set pieces designed to match the story’s shifting perspectives and performative spycraft. Some of his movies are better than others. But he’s completely incapable of making a boring one.
So it’s not surprising that his latest gift to filmgoers, Decision to Leave, is brimming with the sort of flourishes and big-swing aesthetics that director Park excels in. There’s a foot chase that feels lifted from an RPG videogame. Split screens and mirror images are abound. When ants begin to crawl across a corpse’s eyeball, we switch to the dead man’s P.O.V., complete with insects scurrying across the frame. Ditto a shot of a text message, which then drops viewers inside the phone for a reverse angle. Whenever there’s a chance to pan or track or glide within an image, especially if such a move helps disorient or mislead a viewer — the pleasure of being deceived is a central theme, after all — the movie will not let those opportunities go to waste.
Yet the single most important shot in Park’s detective story isn’t fancy or grandstanding at all. Busan-based homicide investigator Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is bored; he desperately wants a murder case to dig into, and for his sins, he gets one. A body is found at the bottom of mountain, having plummeted from a great height. Whether the person fell or was pushed is the question. The victim was 60 years old and an avid rock climber. The man’s wife, a much younger Chinese immigrant named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), is brought in for questioning. She doesn’t seemed particularly shocked by her spouse’s death, which immediately seems suspicious. Better bring her in for questioning.
And then Hae-jun meets Seo-rae in the precinct’s interrogation room, and the camera simply holds still on this instantly smitten cop’s face for what feels like eternity and a day. Time stops. He just silently stares at her. Never mind that he’s married, though his wife lives in their apartment in Ipo, a small town near the sea where she works as an administrator at a power plant. Or that he’s a consummate by-the-book professional. (He won’t even allow his rookie partner to beat up criminals! Even when they’re scumbags! The nerve!) You can immediately tell that this gent has fallen, and hard. The poor sap never had a chance.
It’s a scene straight outta 101 noirs, complete with a lovelorn patsy and a potential femme fatale, and the fact that director Park keeps our attention focused on the detective’s thunderstruck face for an uncomfortable amount of time only makes the downfall feel that much more inevitable and fatalistic. Seo-rae quickly goes from being a person of interest to a prime suspect; Hae-jun’s surveillance of her turns into outright stalking equally as fast. Obsession is the name of the game, which a cautious moviegoer might assume this coquettish widow is banking on. He’s easier to manipulate that way, but then again, so are we. This is as much a film about the pleasure of deception and misdirection as anything else.
That means we’re firmly in Hitchcock territory as well, which is nothing new for the Oldboy filmmaker — like anyone who traffics in cinematic shocks and awe, he’s picked through the Master of Suspense’s book of tricks several times over. Only director Park has specifically centered on one vintage Hitch movie this time around, and Decision to Leave proves that the South Korean auteur has come down with a severe case of Vertigo. The fact that Jo Yeong-wook’s score is a dead ringer for Bernard Hermann’s similarly haunting music for that classic only underlines the connection. As does the fact that once Park and his cowriter Jeong Seo-kyeong let us know what’s really going on around the halfway point, they essentially reset the movie, relocate the action solely to Ipo (a quaint burg blessed and cursed with an abundance of fog, not unlike San Francisco) and unleash Hae-jun on a new case. There’s another dead body, another suggestion of foul play, another growing heap of circumstantial evidence that point to a culprit who knew the corpse intimately. And doesn’t that suspect seem familiar….
As with so many mysteries — and Decision to Leave is an amour fou story and a thriller in which smaller mysteries seem to exponentially bloom within larger ones — one has to be careful not to spill any beans, even with the best of critical intentions. It’s safe to say that the movie is also witty in a way that Park’s films usually aren’t (the humor isn’t abyss-black this time around, just charcoal gray), and Hae-jun’s penchant for Method-like immersion in reconstructing murders at crime scenes almost plays like a parody of every other tortured-cop procedural of the last few decades. It’s also a showcase for its leads as much as it a chance for the man behind the camera to once again show off his chops, with both Park Hae-il and Wei suggesting a catch-and-release relationship that pings from an oddly comfortable domesticity (he cooks for her; they clean up after each other) to unconsummated passion. The tenderness between them only makes the undeniable sense that this can’t end well that much more tragic.
And yeah, as with every one of Park’s extraordinary works to date, Decision to Leave is most definitely a tragedy. Unlike those previous films, however, it’s not exactly of the Greek or extremely Grand Guignol type. Most noirs underline the fact that people, they ain’t no good. This elegantly pulpy fiction merely reminds you that folks merely see what they want to see, and tend to turn a blind eye or ear when it’s convenient for them to do so. You can’t trust what you believe to be true or rely on technology, which can be used to obscure as much as shed new light, or become as useless as anything else in the face of fate. You may as well fight the tide, it gently suggests, before literalizing that notion for one last cruel joke. Except when Park is twisting the screws here, however, he’s being cruel to be kind for once. We expect cinematic fireworks with a stylist like him. It’s his sense of restraint and his substance, however, that makes what could have just been a clever check-out-these-moves exercise feel like a genuinely emotional showstopper. A wise decision indeed.
