‘Decision To Leave’ is Park Chan-wook’s Most Melancholy Thriller

“First and foremost the film that made me decide to become a filmmaker was Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”

The aforementioned quote, from a 2013 interview with That Shelf, is the Rosetta Stone for Decision To Leave, the latest thriller from South Korean virtuoso Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden), his first feature film in six years, and the most intoxicating work of his career. Alfred Hitchcock’s influence can be found all over Park’s work, especially in his 2013 English-language debut Stoker—around which the interview centered—but Decision To Leave represents a definitive statement. The film may be overtly Vertigo-esque in its plot, its two distinct halves, and its tale of a detective obsessed with a mysterious woman, but it is also Park’s biggest aesthetic departure from any discernible Western influence. The seeds of Hitchcock are present, but in Park’s guiding hands, a full 30 years into his career, they bloom into something wildly fun, surprisingly melancholy, and wholly unique, as he uses a murder mystery as a Trojan horse for a tale of longing.

Mere minutes into its runtime, the film yanks the audience by the collar, forcing them to attention with a number of shots captured from innovative points of view—like from the open eyes of a dead businessman, as an ant crawls across his eyeballs, as he gazes up at the mountainous summit from which he fell to his death during a climbing expedition. This is, of course, an unreal imagining, but as a forensic crew sweeps the crime scene up above, the images make it crystal clear that we are seated firmly within the confines of a winding mystery, told from an unexpected vantage, and crafted with precision by Park and co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong.

The dead man doesn’t matter all that much, but what does matter is the domino effect his death sets into motion, especially concerning the listless, insomniac Busan investigator Hae-joon (Park Hae-il). The lonely detective becomes obsessed, first with the details of the case—it seems like an accident or suicide, but something feels amiss—and then with the deceased man’s wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese national whose spoken Korean is formal and polite, but whose behavior is just as odd as the circumstances of the case. Seo-rae smiles a little too much for a new widow, and she doesn’t seem all that broken up about her husband’s fate, though several lingering hints of an abusive marriage (like scratches and bruises) could potentially explain this.

Does this mean Seo-rae is a black widow? Hae-joon isn’t sure what to believe, but the more he gazes at her—often through windows, from afar—the more he feels drawn to her. Park dramatizes this sensation in exciting yet discomforting fashion, contrasting it with scenes of Hae-joon’s own distant marriage by having him imagine himself in the same physical space as Seo-rae while he watches her through binoculars as they begin to speak over the phone. Not only do these self-projections make for economic storytelling, with both characters sharing the frame despite being miles apart, but they imbue each simple stakeout with an astonishing emotional rush, transforming Hae-joon’s infatuation into an out-of-body experience.

While this obsession starts out one-sided, Seo-rae soon begins to reciprocate, and whether or not she has ulterior motives ceases to matter once they forge a genuine connection. Hae-joon is a kindly balm to Seo-rae’s tumultuous past. Seo-rae is a band-aid to Hae-joon’s present, urging him to sleep, and to take his mind off his dozens of open murder cases and their haunting crime scenes photographs, adorning the walls of his private office like messages from the dead. The two of them understand each other, even if they don’t quite trust each other. It’s here that Decision To Leave breaks with Vertigo entirely; both films are thrillers about obsessed policemen, but where Hitchock used this obsession to paint a portrait of broken psychology, Park transforms it into an unpredictable romance that just so happens to speak the cinematic language of a police procedural.

It’s here that Decision To Leave breaks with Vertigo entirely...where Hitchock used this obsession to paint a portrait of broken psychology, Park transforms it into an unpredictable romance that just so happens to speak the cinematic language of a police procedural.

When Park shoots Hae-joon and Seo-rae inside interrogation rooms—often under the watchful eye of onlookers—he hops across visual axes and lines of sight during intimate moments, creating a discombobulating sensation between each cut, as if the viewer is meant to piece together their romantic puzzle. We want their impossible dynamic to work, despite the cop-and-criminal setting. When a two-way mirror sits behind them, reflecting their image back to us, we’re presented with what appears to be four different characters—two reflections of each of them—as cinematographer Kim Ji-yong racks focus in ingenious, often impossible ways. In wide shots, he shifts our gaze between these four visages like a pinball machine, rapidly changing which reflection is in focus, sometimes two at a time, but not in ways the human brain is used to perceiving. Sometimes the focus shifts forward and backward, through the depth of the screen, but sometimes it shifts left to right. Each flourish is amusingly disorienting, but none of the film’s gimmicks are without purpose. Even in the presence of onlookers—the other cops, but the audience, too—Hae-joon and Seo-rae’s repressed romantic chemistry is so uncontainable that it warps the fabric of the camera’s lenses, and the way they capture light. It’s exciting to witness, and it calls into question which parts of themselves they allow each other to see in each moment, and which parts they keep concealed.

While Decision To Leave maintains its narrative similarities to Vertigo, it has more in common tonally and stylistically with Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder. Both are oblique but measured tales of how obsession twists not just the mind, but the heart and soul, and both stories build skillfully through probing close-ups. (Park Hae-il appears in both films as well; Decision to Leave all but quotes a line about his character’s “soft hands” in Memories of Murder). However, in Memories of Murder, the detectives became obsessed with identifying a phantom killer; in Decision to Leave, Hae-joon’s questions of guilt or innocence are projected largely onto one person, a known suspect, and these questions say just as much about him as they do about Seo-rae.

In playing Hae-joon, actor Park Hae-il carries the burden of an unspoken middle-aged ennui, the kind typical of detective figures in the noir and soft-boiled stories from which the film is inspired. His dramatic function is to simultaneously be closed off to every other character on screen, and to open his veins for the viewer, a balance between outward stoicism and a lingering, festering loneliness that he tries to both hide and hint at—a spiritual dilemma that often bursts forth from within, as if he were silently crying out for help, and for human connection, in every scene.

Comedic and tragic in equal measure, it’s a uniquely propulsive film about the way love can heal, loss can curdle, and longing—like a haunting mystery unfolding in the air around you—can contort you from within.

Tang Wei brings a similarly delicate balance to Seo-rae, but in the opposite direction. She makes it clear from the moment she appears that her character is hurt, troubled, perhaps even broken in some fundamental way. But she embodies a sense of mystery—of unknowability. She hides behind an emotional fog that seems to constantly shift its shape. She makes hidden, and mysterious, all the plain emotions that are already on the table for everyone to see. And yet, while the frame remains trained on these two devastating, committed performances, Park refuses to let his film become lethargic. His performers are the heart of his story, but the way he tells that story is manically strange. His camera never sits still, always dipping and ducking behind objects mid-pursuit, and charging into rooms with the same gusto as Hae-joon. Each new scene seems to begin with a stylistic spark, which soon ignites into a blaze that forces you to follow along with its characters’ beguiling dynamics as they twist and turn.

Of course, Park doesn’t shed his Hitchcock influence entirely, and so, like Vertigo, he gives his plot what appears to be a definitive conclusion mid-way through, carving a path for a brand new chapter. However, Park’s homage to the “master of suspense” isn’t to retread holy cinematic ground, but to create suspense in a new way, through a second half that unfolds after a time jump and forces its central couple to ruminate on loss and longing, as the characters age not just physically, but spiritually, becoming weathered and worn down by fantasies of what could have been.

Yet the film never strays from its police-procedural plotting. Instead, it keeps injecting its daring take on the detective genre with even more silent, repressed anguish. And while this results in occasional obtuseness, when it comes to Hae-joon trying to figure out his next Seo-rae-centric mystery (there’s only so long viewers can follow a series of questions without being given any semblance of answer), the film brings it all home in riveting fashion, in an emotional crescendo best left un-spoiled.

Decision to Leave won Park the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and watching any individual scene is proof of why, whether an energetic sequence where he practically tosses his camera into the whirlwind mystery, or a moment of measured drama, where his subtle movements across space and time (and more importantly, between characters) punctuate emotional knife-twists. The sum total of all these scenes, strung together tightly yet rhythmically by editor Kim Sang-bum, is Park’s finest, most impactful work in years. Comedic and tragic in equal measure, it’s a uniquely propulsive film about the way love can heal, loss can curdle, and longing—like a haunting mystery unfolding in the air around you—can contort you from within.