Decision to Leave Review

Decision to Leave is the 11^th film directed by Park Chan-wook. This time the legendary Korean filmmaker made a mainstream thriller.

Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is a police detective in Busan who suffers from insomnia. Jang investigates the death of a mountain climber and the mountain climber’s Chinese wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) becomes a suspect. When investigating the case Jang becomes drawn to Seo-rae and the lines between the professional and personal get blurred.

Park needs little introduction. He’s one of South Korea’s most famous and successful directors. He’s probably best known for the cult classic Oldboy which was a dark thriller that had that awesome hammer fight and a shocking twist. His filmography has been varied, he has made thrillers, dramas, rom-coms, and horror. Decision to Leave was a more accessible film.

Decision to Leave was a Hitchcockian-style thriller. With a few rewrites it could have been set in the United States, United Kingdom, France, or any other country that you can think of. This shows there’s a universality to the film. It has the tropes of the noir genre because it had a tortured detective and a femme fatale and it had the question of whether Seo-rae was guilty or not.

Decision to Leave had a Basic Instinct quality since it was about the relationship between a police detective and a woman he was investigating. Decision to Leave was a lot less sexually charged than the Paul Verhoeven film. Decision to Leave still had a voyeuristic quality to it. Jang spent the first third of the film watching Seo-rae and making notes with his smartwatch. There was a striking image when Jang was hiding up a tree to watch Seo-rae feed a cat and recorded her saying something in Chinese.

Seo-rae also followed Jang when he was on duty and saw him in action when he was fighting a criminal. Park’s directional flair was on display during some of these sequences. When Jang watched Seo-rae the detective imagined himself in Seo-rae’s apartment and recorded notes in her presence. It was a merger of fantasy and reality.

The parallels to Basic Instinct also came with Jang’s relationship with his wife, Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun). Their marriage was at a distance due to Jung-an being a nuclear technician, she had a scientific mind. The pair only had sex because Jung-an saw the chemical benefits, not as an expression of love. Seo-rae offered something to Jang that Jung-an couldn’t.

Jang was an interesting character because he was a moral character who was becoming corrupt because of his infatuation with Seo-rae. He was tortured because he suffered guilt over all the cases he couldn’t solve. He wasn’t a cop who took bribes, made dodgy deals, or planted evidence on suspects. Jang’s potential fall was high.

Whilst Park’s had a familiar feel to Western thrillers, his presence was felt with the presentation. Park’s tropes were in Decision to Leave. There was extensive use of flashbacks to show some of Jang’s previous cases and Seo-rae’s relationship with her mother. There was also a middle-act twist that changed the direction of the film. In Decision to Leave’s case, the film goes from Busan to the smaller city of Ipo.

The shift from Busan to Ipo brought about a lot of changes and contrasts. Busan was a bustling city whilst Ipo was a quieter town. Ipo’s police department had less money and resources than Busan, as shown by the equipment available at the police station and the cuisine served to suspects. Ipo was so sleepy that Jang got to investigate the first-ever murder case.

There was also a fair amount of humour in the film. Go Kyung-pyo played Jang’s police partner in Busan and he was shown to be a buffoon. Go lifted a lot of tension during the film, like when the police gave chase to a suspect and he was unable to keep up. A subplot involving the theft of some turtles felt like it came from Bong Joon-ho’s work rather than Park’s.

Decision to Leave wasn’t as provocative as some of Park Chan-wook’s other work, but it was a well-constructed thriller. It’s a film that can ease newcomers into Park’s filmography.