Decision To Leave movie review: Korean maestro Park Chan-wook’s neo-noir romance is unlike his past films

Language: Korean with English subtitles

Cast: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il, Lee Jung-hyun, Park Yong-woo, Jung Young-Sook

Director: Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook’s new film Decision To Leave drops this weekend in the Indian streaming space, and lovers of the Korean maestro’s signature style are in for a departure of sorts. With his latest, the filmmaker forays neo-noir romance. In tone and mood at least, Decision To Leave marks a shift from most of what defines his identity as an artist-provocateur given to bursts of graphic extremes. A lyrical piece that sees Parkbank on poignancy while exploring familiar themes as desire, obsession and repentance, Decision To Leave is also the least flamboyant film he has made in a while.

To most world cinema buffs, instant recall of Park’s oeuvre probably rests on Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance — the filmmaker’s famed and informally-called Vengeance trilogy. These are the films that primarily put Park on the global map as an auteur par excellence.Released in the early to mid-2000s, the trilogy typically defines his affinity for uncanny plots and protagonists that exist in a world of uber-violence, yet are brought alive with wry humour and through frames bearing the sublimity offine art.

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Decision To Leave is a quieter film than most of Park’s works, plot-wise and in terms of cinematic innovation. You spot the hallmark Expressionist vibes, as well as Park’s sense of black comedy, and the film is notably lower on the gore factor compared to most of his works. Park, who is known to effortlessly balance arthouse aesthetics with a blockbuster entertainment quotient in his films, is significantly less mainstream in his filmmaking idiom this time. The twists in the story are psychologicalrather than induced by physical action, and the plot progression mainly rests on a complex relationship dramathan his favourite motive of revenge.

Park and co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong have centred the drama on a murder mystery, though surprisingly avoiding a vividly violent portrayal of the act. A retired man, who is an avid mountaineer, is found dead at the foot of a cliff he is known to have climbed often, and Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), an insomniac police officer, is assigned the case. The cops are suspicious of the man’s much-younger wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a Chinese immigrant, because she shows no sign of grief or shock on her husband’s death. As he probes the case, Hae-jun finds himself irresistibly drawn to the woman and is soon fixated enough to literally stalk her in the name of routine surveillance. An officer of integrity, Hae-jun sincerely wants to solve the case. Yet, he is wracked with fear that his investigation might end up proving Seo-rae is the killer.

The screenplay adheres to classic neo-noir norms including a vital twist halfway through and a tragic undercurrent in the relationship drama. Park banks on abstract stretches of storytelling, letting scenes that depict Hae-jun’s imagination merge into reality. These mostly pertain to the cop visualising himself with Seo-rae in the same room, trying to figure out her thought process. The idea is aimed at heightening the mystery element as well as reiterate Hae-jun’s escalating obsession for Seo-rae, yet often it serves to trigger off confusion in many parts over the real and the illusory.

The use of imagination as well as symbolism, of course, is a commonality that Decision To Leave shares with many of Park’s earlier films. A recognisable metaphor is the use of ants, which brings back flashes of Oldboy. In the 2003 revenge thriller, hallucination of ants is explained to be a sign of loneliness. In Decision To Leave, Park shows a close-up of the dead man’s face with ants crawling all over it. We learn of his strained relationship with his wife.

Park’s interest in human relationship drama against a backdrop of crime would seem like an extension of his last directorial, The Handmaiden, which released six years ago. Based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, the lavish romantic thriller saw the filmmaker at his creative best, reimagining the book’s backdrop of Victorian era England as Japan-occupied Korea of the 1930s for the film, at the same time a love story and a revenge drama that balances overt sexuality and graphic violence with a gripping story of deceit. Despite its many flashbacks, The Handmaiden was an example of lucid storytelling, something you cannot necessarily say of Decision To Leave. Park’s new film seems incoherent in parts, as it flits in and out of Hae-jun’s imagination.

What is interesting about Park’s latest is his attempt to understand violence and death from a new perspective rather than explicitly show these on screen as he has done in the past. The idea becomes obvious as Hae-jun, over dinner, describes to Seo-rae the process of insects accumulating on a decaying corpse: “The first to arrive are flies, within 10 minutes. They consume blood or excretions, and lay eggs in any wound or orifice. When the maggots hatch, that’s when the ants arrive to eat them. After that, there are the beetles and wasps. They all feast on the dead,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone, as he offers Seo-rae a dish he has just prepared for her. She continues eating even as he describes a gory unsolved death. Violence, the film reminds us, is implicit in every human mind. The protagonists of Decision To Leave engage in it, but strictly through discussions. Park’s mellowed down stance while addressing violence and death comes across as a surprise because this is a storyteller who redefined violence as an outlet of angst with each new film in the past, his all time high probably being Oldboy where the protagonist cuts out his own tongue with a pair of shearsin an act of atonement.

Park has clearly tried moving away from that pronounced phase of gore, as well as depicting nudity and sexual content, at least for now. Instead of banking on such familiar devices, the filmmaker uses language barrier that Hae-jun, a Korean, and Seo-rae, a Chinese, face as a vehicle to intensify their relationship drama. Decision To Leave is a very different Park Chan-wook film, though it doesn’t quite scale the high of his most accomplished works.

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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