Director: Park Chan-wook
Writers: Park Chan-wook, Jeong Seo-kyeong
Cast: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il
A romantic thriller that blurs the line between the procedural nature of being surveilled and the seductive allure of being seen, Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave might be more muted than his previous films, but the melancholic despair it accumulates by the end couldn’t be more distinctly his. The frisson that develops between its lead characters, a detective and his prime suspect, slots perfectly into a filmography rife with examinations of illicit relationships — a priest and his childhood friend’s wife (Thirst), an oblivious father and daughter (Oldboy), a wealthy lady and the pickpocket masquerading as her handmaiden (The Handmaiden). Love in Park Chan-wook’s world oscillates between a corrosive force and an act of redemption and it’s this precise slipperiness that allows the characters in Decision To Leave to approach a murder investigation with all the intensity of a courtship ritual.
What worries Seo-Rae (Tang Wei) isn’t that detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) might find evidence linking her to her husband’s death, but that with the case closed, she might cease to occupy his thoughts. Meanwhile Hae-jun, fixated on his suspect, isn’t exactly immune to her ability to pull him out of his own head. The two might start off positioned on opposite sides of the interrogation room, but the framing hints at what’s to come, nudging their reflections closer together. The camerawork grants them a way to occupy and infiltrate each other’s thoughts and spaces with an ease that suggests they’ve always belonged there. There’s a communication barrier between the two — he’s Korean, she’s Chinese and the measured tones of a translation app can’t always convey the intensity of her feelings — but it’s rendered irrelevant by how they seem to be speaking a second, secret language just between the two of them. That’s what makes it so thrilling when one of them finally gets to the point. “Do you stop liking someone you like when they get married?” Seo-Rae asks. Decision To Leave might be chaste by Park Chan-wook standards, but every act is charged with an undercurrent of attraction. A scene of Seo-Rae using Hae-jun’s chapstick speaks to the director’s ability to mine eroticism simply from the intimacy of this gesture.
