Park Chan-wook is the heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock (and, by extension, Brian De Palma), and Decision to Leave is further proof that no one does modern erotic thrillers quite like him. Earning Park the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film—now in theaters, following its recent bow at the New York Film Festival—is a spellbinding swirl of romance, passion, and projection, all of it enlivened by beguiling secrets and formal sumptuousness. Like his prior Oldboy and The Handmaiden, it’s a genre work of superior, silken craftsmanship, so sinister, serpentine and sexy as to be downright swoon-worthy.
In a Busan envisioned as a constricting (and exhausting) maze, detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is tasked with investigating the death of a man who fell while climbing an enormous rock formation. In the first of many wry comedic moments, Hae-joon forces his younger and more reckless partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-pyo) to scale that peak in reverse as a method of tracing the victim’s final path. The urge to assume someone else’s point of view is central to Decision to Leave, and Park underscores that via a heady onslaught of compositions from various POVs (and high and low angles), fantasy sequences in which people imagine themselves in different spaces, and innumerable shots involving mirrors and reflective surfaces. Couple that with a fixation on diagonal visual lines—be it halls, staircases, ramps, passages or other cockeyed architectural structures—as well as windows and doorways that box in characters, and the film proves a fantasia of ever-shifting vantage points.
To augment that atmosphere, Park employs an array of velvety pans, urgent zooms into and out of close-up, and montages set to contrapuntal audio. Also featuring Jo Yeong-wook’s Bernard Herrmann-esque score of anxious and sensual woodwinds and strings, the director’s aesthetics are marvelously intoxicating, creating a mood that’s equal parts Vertigo, Body Double, and In a Lonely Place. Co-written by Jeong Seo-kyeong, Park’s script moves at a pace that’s so fast as to be initially unsettling. Yet his images—edited together with hypnotic grace by Kim Sang-bum—are so expressive and suggestive that it's easy to not only keep up with the proceedings’ twists and turns, but to be swept away by the dreamy action.
Hae-joon’s inquiry into the rock-climbing fatality leads him to the deceased’s wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant who speaks in shaky Korean and works as an elderly care nurse. Seo-rae was supposedly with one of her patients on the morning that her husband met his grisly fate, and Hae-joon is willing to believe in her innocence, since he’s immediately smitten by her beauty. Not that he’s initially willing to admit that; he balks when Soo-wan chastises him for treating Seo-rae more leniently than he would a less attractive (or male) suspect. Nonetheless, Hae-joon quickly falls under Seo-rae’s spell—a state of being enhanced by his recurring insomnia, which leaves him struggling to stay awake while behind the wheel of his car, and strangely detached from his wife Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun), who warns him about the ominous statistics regarding couples that don’t regularly have sex.
Hae-joon and Soo-wan are simultaneously on the trail of another criminal who, it’s soon revealed, is also in a love triangle, thereby adding to Decision to Leave’s overarching mix of hallucinatory romance, sex, and violence. Those elements are all a part of Hae-joon’s growing infatuation with Seo-rae, who’s been abused and branded by her husband (with his initials), and whom Hae-joon watches eating ice cream for dinner (and smoking afterward) during all-night stakeouts of her home. Before long, he’s envisioning himself beside her in that residence, and then literally spending nights together with her, where she pores over his evidence board of unsolved crimes and helps him sleep through techniques that were originally developed by the U.S. Navy. During subsequent rainy walks around temples and nocturnal text exchanges, their amour blossoms, complicated by Hae-joon’s nagging suspicion that Seo-rae had something to do with her spouse’s demise.
Hae-joon’s use of eyedrops is another way in which Decision to Leave foregrounds the act of seeing (and the difficulty of clearly doing so), not to mention suggests the character’s internal unhappiness and distress, born from being caught between duty and desire. By the time Seo-rae’s case is resolved, Hae-joon is outright admitting, “I’m completely shattered.” Park’s film subsequently jumps thirteen months into the future to locate him trying to put himself back together in the misty town of Ipo, where—in a twist of fate that may not be as coincidental as it’s intended to appear—he runs into Seo-rae, who’s now married to a new man. Alas, Seo-rae’s second matrimonial go-round turns out to be no more stable than the previous one, and when she finds herself in the middle of another murder investigation, Hae-joon’s world spins even more deliriously out of control.
Hae-joon looks into this homicide with a new, inquisitive partner, Yeon-su (Kim Shin-young), whose pesky questions only heighten his mania, and Decision to Leave’s closing act plummets into a vortex of entangled emotions, with Park Hae-il and Tang Wei sharing such palpable sparks that the material pulsates with eroticized fear and confusion. That’s also due to Park’s direction, which takes exhilarating advantage of physical locations—be it interior bathrooms, exterior mountain ridges or the cozy confines of a car—to alternately separate and bind his protagonists. The film is all breathless, throbbing energy, as well as morose longing and existential malaise, the last of which seems to plague Hae-joon, a man doomed to sleepwalk through life due to an inability to make peace with the past.
Park’s latest is ultimately a saga about leaving—and letting go—as a potential means of securing some measure of solace, and the way such plans don’t always play out as precisely as one might hope. Both Hae-joon’s and Seo-rae’s climactic decisions will likely inspire post-credits debates among viewers, but what’s never in doubt is Park’s command of the medium, which is so remarkably confident that Decision to Leave winds up being the sort of ardent mystery one wishes would never end.
