139 min | NR | October 14, 2022 | MUBI
A detective investigates a man who falls to his death from a mountain. He becomes obsessed with the dead man’s widow, a Chinese immigrant who may have done it. Park Chan-wook makes the interrogation room the most erotic place in cinema.
Jang Hae-joon is a Busan detective who cannot sleep. A man falls from a mountain peak and dies on the rocks below. Hae-joon investigates the widow, Song Seo-rae, and finds himself watching her the way a man watches someone he wants. Decision to Leave looks like a murder mystery and operates like one. Underneath the procedure it is a film about a married man who falls in love with his prime suspect and lets the case become an excuse to stay near her. The mystery is the cover story. The longing is the plot.
Park Hae-il plays Hae-joon as a man of fastidious control who comes undone in small increments. He eats his meals with deliberate neatness and conducts stakeouts with monastic patience. Tang Wei plays Seo-rae with a guardedness that reads as either grief or calculation, and the film never lets you settle on which. She speaks Korean through a translation app and the gap between her words and the device flattens her, which makes her unreadable in a way that draws Hae-joon in deeper. The two of them play scenes of interrogation as scenes of courtship. A sushi dinner and a crime-scene photo carry the same charge.
Park Chan-wook directs from a script he wrote with Chung Seo-kyung, and his formal control is the engine of the whole thing. He stages surveillance as intimacy. Hae-joon watches Seo-rae through binoculars and the camera dissolves him into her apartment so that he stands beside her while he spies from across the street. The editing collapses the distance between watcher and watched until the two positions become one. Park uses match cuts and impossible eyelines to put his detective inside the life he is supposed to observe from outside, and the technique makes the obsession physical rather than stated.
This is a noir with the violence drained out and the yearning left to fill the space. Park spent his career on revenge and brutality and here he turns the same precision toward restraint. The film withholds the consummation the genre promises and replaces it with phones, fog, and the ocean. Decision to Leave understands that the most dangerous thing a person can do is pay close attention to someone. It builds a love story out of evidence and lets the evidence break both of them.