"Decision to Leave" - Film Review
On its surface, Park Chan-wook’s latest, Decision to Leave, is a murder mystery. Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), an insomniac detective, is tasked with solving the murder of a man (Yoo Seung-mok) found at the bottom of a steep mountain he often climbed. The man left behind his wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei). While Hae-jun investigates, the relationship between him and Seo-rae begins to approach romance. Beyond the mystery of whodunit is a much more subtle exploration of loss, love, and regret.
Unsurprisingly, Decision to Leave is a well-choreographed masterpiece. Time and again, Park has created films that are lyrical in their movements. Not just in the motion of the actors, but the way the camera moves, the edits, and the dissolves. As the insomniac detective becomes more exhausted, the film mimics his increasingly failing grip on reality. Hae-jun pictures events he wasn’t privy to and the edits become more frantic. It’s a finely tuned dance that we are lucky to experience.
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Park manages to invoke the styles of Wong Kar-wai and Alfred Hitchcock in the same breath. A mix of film noir and sensual love story, Decision to Leave is right at home in Park’s filmography. He creates tales of revenge and violence that are neatly tied together with love. This duality is represented in the film’s dueling environments of the mountain and the sea. Perhaps more stylized than Park’s previous works, there’s something magical about the composition of each shot. The colors of the wallpapers, of Seo-rae’s ever-shifting blue-green dress, and the monochromatic wardrobe of Hae-jun all weave a spectacular visual tapestry for the audience to feast on.
Ultimately, the mystery at the heart of Decision to Leave is not who committed the crime. That’s something the audience can likely figure out before our bumbling detective does. Instead, the mystery is about humans. Why do we love the people we love? What obvious things do we allow ourselves to overlook because we hope there’s a different answer? When does yearning turn into obsession? How do these concepts play out when the people asking the question are the suspect and the cop, forever at odds with each other?
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Hae-jun says he has trouble sleeping at night because of the unsolved case photographs that plaster his walls. He won’t take them down until he solves them, but he’s too exhausted and overworked to have a real shot at answering those mysteries. Seo-rae tells Haw-jun that maybe she’s in his life to become one of those unsolved stories that keeps him up at night. That’s what keeps both vengeance and love alive. Both of those emotions are impossible-to-solve mysteries. Revenge never seems to make things right, and love will never be quantifiable in the way we want. Decision to Leave puts the audience in the middle of those clashing emotions and forces them to decide when it’s time to go.
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