Decision to Leave (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Decision to Leave (2022) – C.-W. Park

Lovers of film noir (or neo-noir) may feel they’ve seen this film before (in English, if not Korean). There’s the straight-laced detective, Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) not entirely satisfied with his married life (living apart except for the weekends; him in Busan, her in Ipo working at a nuclear power plant). There’s the suspect, Song Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant who may or may not have killed her older Korean husband, who died in a suspicious climbing accident. When they’re thrown together, he finds himself losing his bearings. His other case suffers. She’s clearly attracted to him and him to her. His insomnia gives him the opportunity to stakeout her place and dictate notes to himself on his phone. She tails him too, on hand when he corners a suspect in his other case in a thrilling rooftop chase reminiscent of Vertigo. This isn’t the only allusion to Hitchcock, as the moody symphonic score also harkens back to the Master of Suspense, as does the dangerously obsessive love of the detective for a possibly untruthful woman. Director Park Chan-Wook expertly evokes the genre, luring us in, giving us the sense that we the audience are being played, just as Hae-joon may be. Yet, he’s playful, using creative camerawork and perfectly designed shots to heighten our pleasure, just as he does by guiding the plot through three well-punctuated acts, tantalising us with a build-up of clues and emotion-laden set-pieces that were bound to happen (a rainy visit to an abandoned temple is a highlight) with a recurring musical theme about being lost in the mist, the ideal metaphor. Only when we finally get a scene that does not take place from Hae-joon’s point-of-view do we get jarred out of our dream, scrambling to put the pieces together, wondering now whether we need to rethink all that’s come before. But Park Chan-Wook does not let us noir fans off easy, we can’t have the ending we expect, which sends thoughts spinning in a far more tragic direction. One for the cinephiles.