Decision to Leave Review | A Lot of Reasons to Stay

Decision to Leave, the latest genre hopping exercise from Korean master Park Chan-wook, is a playful Hitchcock homage where the mystery and thriller aspects are secondary to an unusual romance. It’s not unfamiliar territory for the filmmaker behind such films as Stoker, The Handmaiden, and Oldboy, but Decision to Leave might be Park’s most personal work to date. Although it’s a bit more stylistically subdued than some of Park’s previously films, Decision to Leave is one of those movies where the viewer can tell the person making it is having a lot of fun, and the feeling becomes delightfully infectious.

Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is burnt out. He works in Busan, but he lives with his wife in a seaside community some distance away, only returning home on the weekends. He spends most of his sleepless nights on stakeouts, hot on the trail of a pair of elusive killers that have frustrated the police for weeks. During this time, another case crosses his path, but this one is less open and shut than it initially appears. A prominent businessman and rock climber has plummeted to his death. At first, the death looks like a cut and dry case of suicide, but Hae-joon and his partner almost immediately realize that something isn’t adding up. Suspicion is cast upon Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the man’s widow. She’s a Chinese ex-pat living in Korea who claims her husband was abusive. The lonely and unhappily married Hae-joon starts developing feelings for Seo-rae, despite the fact that she might be a killer with ulterior motives, leading to an unusual situation where the detective and the prime suspect begin following each other around on the sly.

Winner of a Best Director award at Cannes this year for Park and this year’s International Feature Oscar selection from South Korea, Decision to Leave is a great example of a filmmaker relaxed and fully in their element. While Decision to Leave isn’t as violent or sexually frank as one might expect from Park, his direction and storytelling abilities remain impeccable. The thriller aspects are paradoxically subtle and obvious, but they aren’t unexciting, including a pair of dazzling foot chases that are up there with the best action sequences of the year. There are a lot of moving parts to the mystery, but they all point in the same general direction, meaning it’s secondary to a deeper push and pull between the characters. The mystery matters to the people caught up in it, but the how and why of it all starts to become immaterial the longer the film goes on.

Decision to Leave is a film with a little bit of everything: satire, dark humour, sensuality, social commentary, brutality, dreaminess, adrenaline, depression. In less capable hands, Decision to Leave would be an unbalanced, atonal mess searching for some sort of structure. This entire enterprise is just a few bad decisions away from being no different from the glut of erotic thrillers that cluttered North American multiplexes in the mid-90s. But Park displays such a clarity of vision and ambition that there isn’t a shred of emotional whiplash or narrative contrivance. Amid all of the mirror reflections, parallels, misdirections, and clever visual cues, there’s a perfectly pronounced throughline that never gives way to distraction and overplotting, even though there remain some questions regarding logic and motivation that still don’t make a ton of sense by the conclusion.

Decision to Leave keeps branching off into new and exciting directions as it moves along at a pace that’s brisker than one expects from a relatively subdued, nearly two and a half hour film. While Park has created a cinematic language that’s entirely his own over the years, there are distinct and fresh injections of European and Chinese influence in Decision to Leave. Although the Hitchcock parallels are obvious here (with Vertigo being one of Park’s all time favourite films), there are also shades of Melville, Truffaut, Antonioni, Ang Lee, and Wong Kar-wai throughout. There are delightful hints of ennui and menace that never overpower the narrative or its characters; each scene rife with a sense of longing that can’t be fully satiated or reasoned.

But perhaps best of all, Decision to Leave ends up being one of Park’s most effortlessly entertaining films. The interplay between the perfectly paired leads combined with a masterful sense of psychological purpose. It’s cool without being cocky or icy and crowd pleasing without pandering to viewers. It’s not Park’s most perfect film, but Decision to Leave is a slick, confident, and wholly welcome addition to his filmography.

Decision to Leave opens exclusively at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, October 28, 2022. It expands to Vancouver on November 3, to Ottawa, Kingston, Waterloo, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Victoria on November 4, and to additional Canadian cities throughout the fall.