Decision to Leave: Deadly Details

Park Chan-wook's films always have such humorously quirky details. In Decision to Leave, there's a handheld electric massager, the home health aide's clear plastic apron, the cop's ingenious chainmail glove, a Martin Beck crime novel, and the audio translator that switches the voice from female to male when it goes from Chinese to Korean... Of course, all of that would mean nothing if Park didn't bring that same attentiveness to narrative as well. And like many Park movies, Decision to Leave has a complicated plot to pair with these elements.

When a police detective (Park Hae-il) investigates a potential suicide, he becomes obsessed with the surviving wife (Tang Wei) who his cop partner (Go Kyung-Pyo) feels sure is the dead man's killer. Then the whole thing repeats — a new squad sidekick (Kim Shin-young)— again in another city. That's when Decision to Leave really soars. Complications become complexities; Park's decision to create simultaneities — allowing the past and present to coexist in a frame — grows even more poetic as history repeats itself in the linear storyline. And isn't the past, inherently, always something of a blur? Aren't we always haunted by the choices we make?

These are classic Park questions. And aside from the atypically restrained violence (a turtle bite may be as gruesome as it gets), this is a quintessential Park movie, right down to the score by Jo Yeong-wook (a composer who's been collaborating with Park fairly consistently since 2000's Joint Security Area). Everything is so carefully constructed that you have to admire the craftsmanship, even if you occasionaly can predict where it's going. A Greek tragedy doesn't depend on being surprised by every twist and turn or the ending. Nor does this Korean one.