Detective Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il) is called to the base of a mountain where Ki Do Soo’s (Seung-mok Yoo) body has been discovered after an apparent fall.  Before he can rule the death a suicide, he interviews the immigration worker’s young Chinese immigrant wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei).  The woman seems unfazed by her husband’s demise, and the bruises on her body lead Hae-Jun to keep a close eye on the suspect, however these stakeouts in front of her home eventually lead to an affair between the detective and the suspect until at last the case is closed and Seo-Rae is ruled innocent.  Hae-Jun returns to his wife, Jung-An (Lee Jung-hyun), where they live happily for some time until he is called to investigate another crime; Ho-Shin (Park Yong-woo), Seo-Rae’s new husband, was discovered dead in his swimming pool. 

After premiering at the 2022 iteration of the Cannes Film Festival, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave was picked up by Mubi for distribution theatrically in the States.  Co-written with Jeong Seo-kyeong, this latest twisted mystery is full of style and delivers a lush world of lies, lust, and longing.  At 138 minutes, the film presents a dense mystery, at least in terms of misc en scene, but the overall story suffers under the weight of the runtime.  Thankfully, Kim Ji-yong’s cinematography with Sang-beom Kim’s editing allows the film to remain visually exciting throughout and Yeong-wook Jo’s score helps audiences track the twisting emotional arcs and also inspires suspense as the clues reveal themselves.  

To view Decision to Leave as a straight mystery is the biggest folly, yet also an easy trap to fall into given the director’s previous work, as well as the initial setup of a deceased husband and a remorseless wife.  But the film is not wholly interested in the mystery of the film with all clues pointing pretty squarely toward Seo-Rae, instead, it wants to tell a romantic thriller that finds Hae-Jun at a moral and professional crossroads.  Despite both Hae-il and Wei delivering solid performances on their own, the chemistry between the two is not apparent, and without that spark, the film becomes an impenetrable slog to work through. The root cause of this issue, though, lies in the writing in which Hae-Jun is such a nothing character, a blank enigma with just enough underdeveloped quirks to keep audiences somewhat involved, but entirely at a loss to see how not just one but two women with vastly more interesting attributes and depth want to spend their time with this schmuck. 

While the film is genre confused, the final hour is where it finds its footing and delivers a really poignant and beautifully shot finale.  Late in the film, the two lovers find themselves atop a mountain in an incredibly thrilling, cathartic, and frightening sequence, but it is the final sequence by the sea that is the crown jewel of the film. Everything on a craft level comes together for a phenomenal and overwhelming sequence that finds Hae-Jun frantically searching for Seo-Rae on the beach, and all the details slowly come into focus as the gravity of what is happening begins to wash over the audience.  Finally, Hae-Jun seems to have committed to something in his otherwise transient and temporary life and this desire to find Seo-Rae is palpable, ironic because it is the closest that they seem in the entire film throughout their bumbling affair, yet during this powerful sequence, they never occupy the frame together. 

For all the beauty on the screen, narratively the finale still feels slightly empty especially given the extended chore of getting to this point. To have an abused woman choose to end her life in suicide is, on the surface, a pretty tired and uninspired trope. Thankfully, the script does allow for some deeper reasoning here but the footing of the story is still too unsure to really make it land. The generous reading is that Seo-Rae, who, in her mind at least, is unable to fully capture the attention and affection of Hae-Jun, will make herself the next victim whose death he must investigate. In this way, she will become an object of his obsession, and as a tragic story this interpretation is quite heartbreaking, but it does not land as presented given that Seo-Rae already is a point of obsession for the detective. This dangerous and fatal game of hide and seek bears no winners because Seo-Rae has already achieved her goal many months ago during the investigation of her first husband’s death. This act of self-sacrifice, then, is a futile exercise and ends the film in a way that is not truly ambiguous or open-ended, but just not properly thought out given everything that came before. 

Thematically speaking, the finale works quite well and the themes build on themselves quite nicely. It is a film about the dangers of obsession framed around the question of when to step away. It is clear that Seo-Rae and Hae-Jun have a fatal attraction to each other, and like an addict, they refuse the help of the ones around them that actually love them and want what is best for them, until it is too late. It is a very bleak way to frame the relationship, and perhaps that explains why it is without so much heat as is expected from affairs on film, but instead of adding a flash of romance, this secondary relationship that slowly consumes the two leaves them feeling emptier and emptier until they only have themselves left in this world. It is a messy reading of the film and requires audiences to trace out Hae-Jun’s arc past the end of the film where he presumably is pulled under by the rising tides, but the film – perhaps in an attempt to avoid being too obvious, too soon – lays an almost too complicated trail of clues and motifs to arrive at this conclusion. The anchor points needed to make heads or tails of this thesis are spread too far apart and even when they are presented, they still have such a thick haze of mystery around them that it is a difficult task to track the film as it plays out in real-time.

The driving force behind Decision to Leave is the lush artistry of the sets and creative camera work. One of the most exciting tricks is how Hae-Jun is inserted into the action as he works through the crime scenes. It is not a groundbreaking use of this trick, but it is one of the most fluid examples of this approach that lends to the swirling confusion of the mystery at play. The ever-so-slightly disorienting nature of the camera work, lighting, and design help keep audiences engaged in this strange dissection of the noir genre. Hardly sparse, every location is so fully realized and purposefully manicured to provide an overwhelming amount of visual information treating the mystery like a grand period romance, it is just a shame that the script does not provide Hae-il and Wei with enough of that same detail to inform, enhance, and more importantly, complement their performances and bring merit to their affair. 

Like many of the hottest directors today, their reputation is often the biggest crux of their most recent work and that rings true here for Chan-wook. Oldboy (2003). Thirst (2009). The Handmaiden (2016). These titles found great success in the international market, so the bar was set quite high for Decision to Leave the instant it was announced and the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock after its premiere only solidified the hype. Even without that outside pressure, Decision to Leave feels very confused on the page, yet not without core ideas. The detective falling against his better judgment for the suspect in a high-profile murder case is inherently interesting and should be quite captivating, but the film lacks the sense of danger and lust needed to really make it into something powerful. While what we see is undeniably beautifully shot, the muted plot leaves much to be desired.