Decision to Leave: Park Chan-wook's Detective Romance

The reputation arrived long before this film did. Park Chan-wook is the director of Oldboy — a hammer, a corridor, a live octopus, a twist that ruined several people’s month. He is the director of Thirst and The Handmaiden. If you had to name the two things a Park film reliably contains, you would say violence and sex, and you would be right about a twenty-year run.

Decision to Leave, from 2022, contains neither. There is no gore. There is no sex anywhere in it — no scene, no shot, nothing. The most transgressive act in the film is a man watching a woman eat, and it is filthier than anything in his back catalogue.

This is a genuine artistic decision rather than a mellowing. Park has been explicit that he wanted to make a film about desire in which nothing is consummated, because a consummated desire is a resolved one, and he wanted the wanting to have nowhere to discharge. What he built instead is a detective story where every investigative act is a caress and every surveillance report is a love letter, and the audience is asked to sit in that for two hours and eighteen minutes with no release valve at all.

The setup

A man falls from a mountain outside Busan and dies at the bottom. Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) catches the case. He is a good policeman — meticulous, humane, slightly vain about his clearance rate — and he has not slept properly in years. His marriage is a weekend arrangement: his wife Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun) lives in Ipo, a foggy town some distance away, and they meet on Fridays.

The dead man’s wife is Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant who works as a carer for the elderly, whose Korean is functional but not fluent, and who does not react to the news of her husband’s death in any of the ways the form requires. She is a suspect immediately, for the oldest and worst reason in police work: she is difficult to read.

Hae-jun puts her under surveillance. He sits outside her flat at night with a flask and binoculars and watches her make dinner. And the film’s engine starts turning, because he is not doing his job any more, and he is doing it beautifully.

The craft: Park’s grammar of intrusion

The single formal device that defines this film is the way Park shoots surveillance. When Hae-jun watches Seo-rae through binoculars from his car, the film does not cut between the watcher and the watched. It puts him in the room with her — standing in her kitchen, sitting on her sofa, inches away, while she moves around him unaware. Then it cuts back and he is in the car.

This is an old trick used with unusual precision. It renders the fantasy as fact and refuses to signpost it, so the audience is briefly disoriented every time, and the disorientation is exactly Hae-jun’s condition: he has stopped being able to distinguish the case from the desire. Park runs the same manoeuvre in reverse later, and each time the cut is a little more unstable.

The second device is the phone. Decision to Leave is one of the very few films to make contemporary technology genuinely cinematic rather than a plotting nuisance. The translation app is a character: Seo-rae speaks Chinese into it and it renders her into a flat synthetic Korean, which means the most emotionally charged statements in the film arrive in a machine’s voice. Park uses that gap constantly. She can say something devastating and have it delivered by a robot, and Hae-jun has to decide how much of it was hers.

Then there is the eye. Park’s compositions are full of surfaces that watch — mirrors, phone screens, mobile-phone cameras, a dead man’s eye, the eyes of the sea. The recurring insert of an insect on a wound in the opening minutes is the film telling you its interests in miniature: something small and patient, arriving where a body has failed.

Cho Young-wuk’s score is doing the last of the work, and it is essential. He writes the film as a romance — swooning, string-heavy, unironic — and lays it over procedure. A man photographing a crime scene is scored like a man falling in love, because he is.

Tang Wei, and the problem of a face

The film cannot exist without Tang Wei’s performance, and the performance is built on a specific formal problem: Seo-rae must be simultaneously legible enough that we understand why he falls, and opaque enough that we cannot rule her out. Tang plays it by removing almost all reactive acting. She does not signal. She responds to the interrogation with a patience that reads as either innocence or enormous discipline, and the film never once tips its hand through her face.

The language barrier is the mechanism that makes this fair rather than a cheat. Seo-rae is not being enigmatic; she is operating in her second language, at a police station, about her dead husband. Every ambiguity in her speech has a mundane explanation available, and Hae-jun keeps choosing the interesting one. Park has designed a femme fatale whose fatality may be entirely constructed by the detective’s own projection — and then declined to tell us whether it is.

Park Hae-il’s performance is the quieter achievement. He plays Hae-jun as a fundamentally decent, orderly man — he uses eye drops, he minds his posture, he is kind to suspects — and lets the decency itself become the sickness. He never behaves badly. He behaves impeccably, at the wrong person, for two hours.

The real ancestor

Vertigo, obviously, and Park has never pretended otherwise: the obsessive investigator, the woman who may be a construction, the second-act reset that starts the whole disease over in a new town. The Ipo section of this film is Park doing Hitchcock’s second half deliberately and openly.

But the more useful ancestor for a collector is Laura — Preminger’s 1944 film in which a detective falls in love with a dead woman through her case file and her portrait, and the object of desire is entirely a construction of evidence. That is closer to what Park is doing, because Hae-jun’s love is made of material: photographs, phone records, statements, a recording. He does not fall for a woman. He falls for a file, and the film’s second half is what happens when the file starts editing itself.

The other pairing worth making is Klute, which sits on the same fault line from the other side — a thriller that quietly transfers itself from the investigator to the woman being investigated. Park does the same handover here, and it is worth watching for the exact moment the film stops being Hae-jun’s.

The case against

The film is difficult on a first pass, and I do not think Park entirely intended the kind of difficulty it has. The plot mechanics — the second case, in particular — are dense, elliptical, and delivered in fragments, and a substantial number of viewers finish it having followed the emotion and lost the events. Park has said he expects a second viewing. That is a reasonable ambition and also a slightly arrogant one, and the film’s Ipo half asks more patience than it strictly earns.

There is also a coolness here that some will find airless. Park’s craft is so total, so composed, so pleased with its own rhymes, that the human catastrophe underneath occasionally reads as an exhibit. When the film wants your heart in the last twenty minutes, it has to work against two hours of exquisite distance, and it does not entirely win.

And a colder objection: the film’s central move — a woman rendered unreadable by a language barrier and then romanticised for it — is exactly the thing it is critiquing, and it is not always clear the film has enough distance from Hae-jun’s gaze to complete the indictment.

Where it leaves you

Decision to Leave won Park the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2022 and was Korea’s Oscar submission. It is on the usual services with a disc release worth owning, and it improves enormously the second time, when the plot is settled and you can watch what he is actually doing with the cuts.

If it lands, the natural double bill is The Handmaiden — the same screenwriting partnership with Jeong Seo-kyeong, the same interest in a con that becomes real, and everything this film withholds.

Spoilers below

Seo-rae killed her husband. She confesses it to Hae-jun, more or less, and the confession is the end of the first movement: he has the recording of her admission, and he takes it to the sea and throws his phone into the waves. The film’s most romantic act is the destruction of evidence by a man who has spent his life collecting it, and Park stages it as a man ending his own career without a word.

That is the hinge, and it is why the second half exists. His case collapses. His marriage collapses. He becomes, in Seo-rae’s word, “shattered” — and she has recorded him saying so, which she then keeps and replays, endlessly, the way he kept her file. The surveillance has reversed. She is now the one making a love object out of an archive.

The Ipo section restarts the disease. She has remarried, to a man who is worse. There is a second body, and Hae-jun — now a diminished detective in a foggy nuclear town, working with his wife nearby — must investigate her again, and this time he cannot tell whether he is being played, whether she has engineered the entire situation to be investigated by him again, or whether she is simply a woman who has twice been married to men who deserved it. Park does not adjudicate.

The ending is the finest thing he has filmed. Seo-rae drives to the beach at Ipo, digs a deep hole in the sand at the tide line, gets into it with a bucket, and waits for the sea. She has arranged, with total precision, to become the one thing Hae-jun can never solve: an unsolved case. He is the only person who could find her, and he will not, because she has made herself the file he cannot close.

Her last recorded message — sent to his phone, playing while he cannot hear it — asks him to throw it into the sea, “in the deep, where nobody can find it,” which is the same instruction she has given her own body. Then the film ends with Hae-jun running along the tide line in the dark, screaming her name at a beach that is filling with water, and the sea takes the sound.

Park’s title finally resolves in that shot. “Decision to leave” is not the wife’s, and not the detective’s. It is a woman choosing the only form of permanence available to her in a genre where women are evidence: she has made herself the unresolved. The romance is consummated exactly once, and it is consummated as a mystery.