Love and mystery intertwine unexpectedly in ‘Decision to Leave’
Director Park Chan-wook subtracts some of his trademark grittiness for a romantic investigation — in more ways than one
Park Chan-wook is no stranger to taking on a challenge. The highly eclectic and acclaimed South Korean director has an extremely varied career, although he’s most known for excellent works like Oldboy, Thirst and The Handmaiden — works that often dance tantalizingly on the two sided-blade of violence and romance.
In some ways, then, Decision to Leave is hardly a surprising turn for Chan-wook. It follows the story of police detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) as he becomes infatuated with Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the prime suspect for the murder of her husband. Nonetheless, the film unravels in unanticipated ways as Chan-wook sheds the bleakest aspects of his previous works to create an atypical mix of the romantic and mysterious.
Rather than predictably serve the audience with what they may expect from him, Chan-wook pulls back and navigates Decision to Leave as a tender exploration on the nature of love, desire and obsession. The first half of the film manages to perfectly encapsulate that feeling when love arrives on the doorstep of your heart. Desire turns to longing as Hae-jun begins to find excuses to keep seeing Seo-rae, be it calling her into the station for questioning or staking out her place and learning everything about her (often played to comedic effect that works surprisingly well).
The attraction is clearly mutual, making the forbidden longing they feel for one another all the more painful. Park and Tang are equally magnetic on-screen, most particularly when they are opposite one another, both expertly encapsulating the way Hae-jun and Seo-rae feel about one another in any frame of the film’s runtime. I’ve seen Decision to Leave dubbed “Park Chan-Wook’s In The Mood For Love”, and while that’s a fair comparison it’s certainly not the only influence Chan-wook takes for the film, with plenty of Hitchcockian shades throughout. This unusual intertwining of mystery and romance is equal parts fascinating and seductive; my sole focus was kept on the film purely to see how these two aspects would eventually coalesce.
Chan-wook brings his typical excellence as a director, working closely with cinematographer Kim Ji-yong and editor Kim Sang-bum to animate Decision to Leave with a real visual kineticism. Many phone conversations are made intensely interesting with the representative placement of actors in different spaces, and there are some truly unreal match cuts and transitions throughout that both make the film distinct to Chan-wook, all while paying homage to his influences. Music and sound design are used with similarly effective results, and the absolutely gorgeous cinematography means that the movie is always a deep pleasure to look at.
The film often feels like a melting pot of different genres and thematic influences, and while I think it’s mostly to the benefit of the work, it doesn’t always pay off. While the first two acts are tightly scripted and practically perfectly balance intrigue and romance, I feel that Decision to Leave’s third act is by far its weakest. Many of the elaborations made in the last half hour did not feel entirely necessary to me, seemingly caught in both a visual and thematic loop that is quite a deep low after such a triumphant narrative climax earlier. Perhaps it’s fitting a film about obsession becomes enamoured with itself in the end as Seo-rae and Hae-jun find it increasingly difficult to part with one another. Nonetheless, I found just how much it retreaded the same ground a bit tiresome.
That criticism not withstanding, Decision to Leave is still quite the achievement for Park Chan-wook as he seems to take the first step in a new direction. Only a director of immense talent could take on a project like this and make it click together so efficiently, effortlessly weaving together stellar performances, photography and post-production into one. Even when the third act ventures onto shakier ground, the excellence of everything else elevates Decision to Leave as another notable entry in an already stellar filmography.
8/10
