"Decision To Leave" is Park Chan-Wook's "Calmest" Twisted Romance

 Park Chan-Wook has chilled out. His newest film, "Decision To Leave", could be described as an erotic crime thriller without it feeling like I'm lying to anyone, but it's pretty low on both sex and violence. The film that takes shape is mellower and tamer than his older western hits like "Oldboy" or "The Handmaiden", but at this moment in time I prefer it to both.

 The plot is basic noir in its broadest stroke: a police detective becomes obsessed with a woman he suspects of murder. In its details, there's something more unique under the hood, a script more focused on the idea of desire than any particulars of crime or romance. The cop Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il) starts as a lazy contradiction (characters are constantly telling the audience that he's the best at what he does, even though we only see him make very obvious mistakes). The suspect Seo-Rae (Chinese star Tang Wei, hardly a stranger to the femme-fatale-with-a-twist role she's playing here) is clearly up to something as she flirts her way out of suspicion. It's fun, an awful lot of fun, with a surprising amount of humor. It may not be deep? Few thrillers in recent memory have been as exciting as the chunk of "Decision To Leave" which follows Hae-Jun trail an ex-juvie murderer, but other than the dark punchline I didn't think much of this storyline had any grander meaning. But then the little things slip into the picture. What looks like an act of passion might actually be covering up evidence - standard enough stuff. Then, a few plot twists later, we get an entire second murder case, and a lot of what looks like covering up a murder is actually an act of passion. By the time we get both leads on top of the mountain together, it's impossible to tell the difference. The film's final subversion, worded as a sort of but not total spoiler: Seo-Rae is after Hae-Jun's obsession itself. Neither love nor hate is as interesting to either character as the act of being obsessed, of wanting something you cannot have. In a lot of ways I preferred the more normal noir of the first half to the frankly messy plotting of the second, but it all works out in the end. Any lacking in story logic gets outweighed in strong emotions. 

 The look of Park's film is exciting in no small part because of how risky it feels. An awful lot of gimmicky camera movements are happening here, including frequent logic-breaking pans (which maybe one should expect in a Korean art film) and overly digital zooms (which most auteurs wouldn't dare shoot for fear of being called lowbrow). Just as much as the content in the script, the visual style feels inappropriate for this kind of film. Of course that only makes it stand out more in your mind in the days after seeing it. "Playful" is not the first word that comes to mind on Park Chan-Wook's career as a whole - but it's the perfect description to use here.

 I would not be shocked if huge fans of Park Chan-Wook find this newest picture a bit disappointing, because it is simple-adjacent (for him!). It's also fair to say that it accomplishes its aims quite well, especially in the emotions, and as a result it ends up as a lot more accessible than most Korean art films that get exported to the west (and I would not be surprised if the Oscars end up showing it some love because of that). What you're left walking away with is a positively wild portrait of two people who would rather be busy than loved.

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