Park Chan-wook's novel Decision to Leave is a romantic thriller. The detective, played by Park Hae-il, is investigating a case of a dead climber when he meets the climber's enigmatic wife, played by Tangwei. The performances by Park Chan-wook and Park Hae-il leave viewers guessing.
After helming masterpieces like Joint Security Area, Oldboy, and The Handmaiden, director Park returns with Decision to Leave. Park never makes clear that the film is about a criminal or a victim. He left us with a confusing puzzle about love, innocence, and truth.
The film shows that her grandfather served as a soldier in Korea against Japan in the 1930s and received an official honor as a Korean patriot. Her coarse use of the language adds another layer of uncertainty to the push and pull. The richness and depth of the film will likely be found by viewers who are proficient in Korean. Is it just her lack of precision in communicating that she is not grieving over her husband's death, or is it something else? Is our suspicion of her due to language, or is there something more sinister underneath the surface?
There is a puzzle about love, innocence, and truth.
Park pulls the curtains back one inch at a time, showing his characters' emotional nature. There are some of the most amazing individuals in Korean cinema this year, and they're all here in one way or another. Decision to Leave plays off the mystery of love and the puzzle of the climber's death against each other.
The central theme of the film is the eye and it is appropriate that it emerges as the main point of the film. Park is obsessed with all the human desires and impulses, which include wanting to see, fearing to look, hiding reality, and surveilling others.
There is a close-up shot of ants crawling over a dead climber. There are similarities between Luis Buuel's An Andalusian Dog and Park's film, particularly in their obsession with eyes and the ideological parallels between sight and cinema itself.
The eyes represent openness and allow living things to look at others. Park suggests that eyes are capable of deception through their ability to manipulate and surveil.
He struggles with insomnia, which causes him to have dry eyes. He doeszes off while on a stakeout. There are a lot of shots of Hae-joon. There is an allegation against institutions and authorities associated with truth- finding and truth-making.
There are cameras in the interrogation room that record the interrogation of both Hae-joon and Seo-rae. The two-way mirror in the interrogation room is one of the voyeuristic machinery used by the detectives.
There is a self-reflexiveness about sight, truth, and the manners in which cinema engages with these two spheres inscribed all over the film. At the end of Decision to Leave, viewers might find themselves overwhelmed by the film's questions about how a film convinces us of a character's goodness or immorality. How do we base our knowledge on characters? Cinema operates on truth and believe.
It is in the film's excursions into morally questionable territories that there is any fault. The film has picked up a lot of praise. He is unfaithful to his wife, he is not doing enough to help his team solve the case of the dead climber, and he is not being professional with his job. The sheen of the film's camerawork makes it easy to see immediately, but it also makes the characters walk morally tenuous lines.
Park's film, Decision to Leave, is a cinematic puzzle. Immigrant tensions, a whodunit mystery, an ill-fated romance, and the isolation of modern life all burn at the edges of this film, yet one can argue that they are irrelevant. The film leaves us questioning everything that we have seen and know and the ride that Park has taken all of us on.
The movie Decision to Leave will be in theaters on October 14.
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