Decision To Leave (2022) Reviewed

Park Chan-Wook’s methodical and intriguing Decision To Leave is one of the year’s best: an exacting and ofttimes hilarious foray into doomed lust and wounded ego’s. It’s present-day Busan and we follow insomniac detective Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) who is investigating the death of a man found broken at the bottom of a mountain. Hae-Joon soon interviews the victims widow Seo-Rae and finds her as alluring and duplicitous as the best of Hithcock’s femme-fatales, (performed by a skilful Tang Wei, balancing composure with hints of erotic forwardness) an immigrant from China with a slender grasp of Korean. It is unclear at times who is seducing who, as Seo-Rae tells Hae- Joon near the films denouement: “The moment you said you loved me, your love is over.The moment your love ends, my love begins.” Lines are crossed and evidence tampered with; sex is mostly left off-screen but the cat and mouse act becomes as thrilling as any coupling- its Park’s best cop story since Joint Security Area (2000).

Decision To Leave is elaborate in its simplicity, and compared to the plot-pirouettes of The Handmaiden (2016) or the celebrated Vengeance trilogy, is all the better for it; the visual language becomes the point, and Park keys up his cerebral insert-shots and focus-pulls like a man who’s made and replayed this film a thousand times in his head: cigarettes and sneakers, chains of text messages, Polaroids, stubble that survived the morning shave, and of course, the green dress (parallels and corollaries to Hitchcock abound). The clues that fuel the pursuit are as addictive as they are minute, and Park, twenty-plus years into his gloriously perverse, ardent career, shows no signs of getting lost in the woods.