Decision to Leave (2022)
Review of Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심), directed by Park Chan-wook
Decision to Leave has been on my radar ever since it was first announced as Park Chan-wook’s newest feature after The Handmaiden.
When I saw who he cast in the leading roles, too, I became even more interested. A cross Chinese and Korean couple in the prism of a crime story, one in which she may or may not have murdered her husband? Count me in. I thought I was going to have to wait until it came out on Mubi for streaming, but then I was invited to the New York Film Festival.
When I was at the festival, I was super nervous about getting a seat. I previously had queued for Showing Up as a work review, and because I didn’t attend the screening before, I didn’t have priority. At NYFF if you’re press or industry, it is first-come first-serve seating, and some of the films were popular enough that if you did not get a seat, it sucks to be you.
White Noise was another big one that they filled two theaters with, but I managed to come an hour early for Decision to Leave and just barely got a seat at the very front. The screening before it was Triangle of Sadness, so I knew I had to be the front of the line if I wanted a seat.
Story time is over—let’s get into the review.
A detective becomes enthralled with his main suspect.
I describe this movie initially as Park Chan-wook returning to his roots, as seen in a movie like Joint Security Area, while mixing in the romantic themes he does not delve into really until his later films.
There are definitely Hitchcock influences scattered throughout this movie, especially in the vein of Vertigo and maybe a dash of Psycho. Decision to Leave tells the story of a detective named Hae-jun, who is fairly unsatisfied with his marriage.
There are sex scenes between his wife and he, but there is no passion in them. She works farther away at a nuclear power plant, and he seems pretty loyal to his job. A known insomniac, that trait of his will get him trouble after being assigned a new case.
A man has fallen off of a mountain. An avid hiker, he was known to hike off of that same mountain as much as he could, making the fact that he fell so much more suspicious.
To make things worse, his widow—portrayed brilliantly by Tang Wei—does not seem to show any remorse at all for the death. It makes the police officers so much more suspicious as to whether this was an accident, suicide, or a murder.
The wife had immigrated from China, yet speaks very good Korean, and the man who died was much older than her as well. Thus Hae-jun decides to start a stake out mission where he pretty much stalks the woman, now named Seo-rae, as she goes through her daily life.
As we find out later in the movie, she is very aware that he is doing this and even ends up planting false signs to put things into his head. She seems to go through a checklist: smoking alone and crying on the couch, making it seem like she is a grieving widow who just wanted some privacy to mourn.
And although Hae-jun suspected her in the beginning, the more he ends up becoming obsessed with her, the more he believes she is innocent. His partner is aghast that Hae-jun has become convinced she is innocent, and even calls him out for buying Seo-rae expensive sushi while being interrogated.
We see the sadistic side of Seo-rae as they grow closer: she admits she killed her own mother with fentanyl because the mother asked her to do so.
However, the more the case becomes convinced it was a suicide, the closer they become. They visit a temple and go to each other’s homes, and while they never explicitly say they love each other or have sex, there’s definitely a romance going on here.
Things get even more twisted, though, when Hae-jun visits one of Seo-rae’s clients (she works as a caretaker for the elderly) and realizes that Seo-rae took her client’s phone the day of and actually did kill her husband.
He tells Seo-rae to leave his life, but things aren’t that easy in this movie. He moves to Ipo, where his wife lives, and ends up crossing paths with Seo-rae again—except this time she has a new husband.
It’s only a matter of time before that husband ends up dead in their swimming pool, and Seo-rae seems to have poisoned his mother in order for a gangster to kill him. Torn between love and duty, Hae-jun has to make a decision, but Seo-rae has another path outlined for herself: she digs a hole on the beach and lets the waves and sand swallow her whole.
There are so many layers to this story I could barely scratch the surface with a one thousand word post.
The way the main characters end up communicating to each other half of the time is through texting, dating the piece in one way or the other, but it adds an element where something that not often physically spoken is brought onto the screen physically.
A lot of this movie lies in the undertones and subtext; Seo-rae plays the character that often slots easily into film noir and the femme fatale, and what ultimately ends up happening to her fits into the genre. Voice recordings also play a key role in conveying information, giving the characters an out when face to face when things could be complicated by emotions.
Overall Thoughts
This honestly was my top movie of 2022. When I left the Walter Reade Theatre at NYFF, the people—all in industry and press—were gushing about what they just saw. Decision to Leave is a gorgeous film on the screen, and I’m sad it did not get the wide theatre distribution it deserved.
In my home city there were no screenings what so ever, which was shocking to me. I purchased a Mubi subscription just to rewatch this on my HDTV at home. Go watch it if you haven’t already—there’s definitely a lot to chew on.
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