Decision to Leave, 2022.
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Starring Park Hae-il, Tang Wei, Go Kyung-Pyo, Jung Yi-seo, Jeong Min Park, Seo Hyun-woo, Teo Yoo, and Lee Jung-hyun
SYNOPSIS:
From a mountain peak in South Korea, a man plummets to his death. Did he jump, or was he pushed? When detective Hae-joon arrives on the scene, he begins to suspect the dead man’s wife Seo-rae. But as he digs deeper into the investigation, he finds himself trapped in a web of deception and desire.
It has been a decade since the bells rang on Park Chan-wook’s sublime The Handmaiden, and now he’s back weaving another tangled-web tale of duplicity with neo-noir delight Decision to Leave.
There is a surprisingly playful tone from the off as we’re introduced to Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and his young cocksure partner, who’re trying to apprehend a couple of local gangsters when the call comes in that a body has been found atop a local mountain. Cut to the two of them abseiling to the summit in a scene that feels straight out of Dumb & Dumber. Too often police procedural narratives are full of alcoholic loners harbouring a dark secret from their past, so it’s refreshing that these are two seemingly normal guys.
In Detective Hae-joon’s case it’s the domesticity of his two-decade marriage that has him infatuated with the main suspect in the mountain murder. A Chinese women named Seo-rae, for whom he’s constantly and perhaps misguidedly always having to speak in simpler terms, even though like most femme-fatales, you wonder if she is understanding more Korean than she let’s on.
Waylaid from main case, Detective Hae-joon then begins a flirtatious interrogation of Seo-rae. Buying her the posh sushi box as he interviews her, staking out her apartment as a cure for his chronic insomnia, when for all intents and purposes the case has already been declared an accident and subsequently closed. Hae-joon is in the same position many a noir protagonist throughout the history of cinema has found himself, and that’s in up to his neck in water.
There’s a theme that runs throughout Decision to Leave about how we perceive things to be and the way we look at them. The camera seems to be obsessed with the eye, even switching to the POV of a corpse at one stage as it looks up at the police. Not only is it sage advice to anyone watching a Park Chan-wook film to pay attention to what’s going on, but in a wider contemporary context the film is asking you to find the truth. Don’t always assume that what is presented to you is real. It might be a rule that has applied to the noir genre ad infinitum, but such themes have never felt more prescient than they do today.
What is undeniably true is that a better looking film you probably won’t find all year. Ji-yong Kim’s cinematography is breath-taking. From the classic looking sea-beaten cliff side exchanges, to the overhead view of a forest lit up by torchlights, and the intimacy of a hill-top crime-scene set against the backdrop of a sprawling Busan, there are so many print-screen moments. Orchestrated by Yeong-wook Jo’s evolving score, along with some of the best edits ever committed to film, (seriously, wait until you see the water drop technique) and Decision to Leave unspools with the creativity and majesty of a visual symphony.
As the couple waltzing through Park Chan-wook’s movements, a merry dance of assumptions and things left unsaid, Park Hae-il and Tang Wei are superb. Their attraction is immediate, the romance restrained, constantly bubbling under alongside secrets and lies. Tang Wei in particular is everything you’d want a femme-fatale to be; likeable but cunning, she ghosts around him as though circling prey, but then offers up a look to suggest that it might not be artifice after all. It’s a requisitely intoxicating performance of understatement and poise.
Your overall enjoyment of any film such as this is whether you think the payoff is worth your time, especially considering this lacks the immediacy of some of the director’s previous masterworks. It’s a slower moving beast, and the destination is one of sadness and melancholy rather than shock, which plays into the fate of the main characters and their arcs, but might not be what an audience is seeking in terms of resolution.
Decision to Leave is telling a relatively straightforward tale of temptation, obsession, and adultery, themes that have populated the genre since the days of Double Indemnity, but with Park Chan-wook operating on a different level to most mere mortals, this twisted romance wrapped in a stunning veneer is deliciously good stuff.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
