World-weary detective falls for sphinx-like widow in a murder case. Talk about the usual suspects! We have seen this setup once or twice.
But “Decision to Leave,” director and co-writer Park Chan-wook’s dazzling, confounding, gorgeously crafted variation on a dangerously familiar film trope, takes its component parts and comes up with something no one has ever built before.
Visually it’s alive every second, in ways both considered and imaginative; the story, meanwhile, takes some risky wait-what? detours en route to a surprisingly grave finish. The South Korean genre master, whose films include the feverishly violent “Oldboy” and the ripely seductive “The Handmaiden,” hasn’t ditched either sex or violence for his latest film, co-written by his frequent collaborator Chung Seo-kyung. But both of those primal cinematic ingredients spice the result here in unexpected ways.
We’re flung headlong into the story. Busan homicide detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is working two cases, and for a while we’re don’t know much to invest — or how much “Decision to Leave” will invest — in Plotline B. The A plot finds a mountain climber dead at the bottom of a peak outside Busan. His Chinese-born widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), is conspicuously unemotional regarding her late husband’s fatal fall. Is she a prime suspect? Or simply a prime target for the detective’s (and the film’s) romantic impulses?
Park complicates this question in every direction. The visual perspectives change on a dime, often wittily. One shot gives us the overhead-clouds viewpoint of the glassy-eyed dead man on the ground, ants skittering across his unseeing eyeballs.
As the apparently mutual attraction between the insomniac detective and his suspect develops, the detective imagines himself — and we see this — as a sort of comforting spirit, right there in the widow’s apartment, ready to grab her cigarette before the ash falls, for example.
The detective has been married for 16 good-enough but increasingly distant years; his wife works in a power plant in a perpetually foggy seaside town a few hours from Busan. When the story zigs and zags to this locale, Park shifts gears to a different kind of movie. So many good filmmakers never seem to shake their influences and inspirations when they take on a genre. Park is different, and better.
Parts of “Decision to Leave” hark back to Old Hollywood, notably to Hitchcock’s rhapsodic bummer of a classic, “Vertigo.” But the movie’s elaborate and extensive interest in GPS tracking devices and translation apps (Korean to Chinese, used by Seo-rae when she’s trying to express herself with extra care and precision) make the experience both classic and a bulletin from the present.
“Am I just a pushover?” the detective asks after a lot, but hardly all, has happened. There’s no noir-ier rhetorical question in all of cinema. In the superb hands of actor Park Hai-il, the detective’s ease of presence and ripples of longing are no less skillfully wrought than Tang’s performance as the tightly wrapped mystery woman. Yes, director Park’s willingness to court a lot of momentary confusion about who’s who and what’s what will be a little much for some. I feel this way: When the filmmaking and the acting’s on this level, Park can zag around all he wants.
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'DECISION TO LEAVE'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
(In Korean and Mandarin with English subtitles)
No MPAA rating (violence, some sexual material and language)
Running time: 2:18
How to watch: Now in theaters
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