Is there a more elegantly wanton director than South Korea’s Park Chan-wook? His latest film, the enthralling, serpentine crime drama Decision to Leave, may be less overtly erotic than his last picture, The Handmaiden, but in its slinkily seductive way there’s a kinship between the two. Both films share an illicit fascination with the darkest impulses of the human soul – the violence, the treachery, the urge to betray. There tends to be a knife-edge of torment in the romantic encounters viewed through Park’s lens, and the uneasy fascination between workaholic detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and recent widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) is no exception. The pain-pleasure balance in their encounters is, more often than not, tipped towards the former.
For Hae-jun, the pain comes in the way thoughts of Seo-rae crowd into his mind unbidden, even while he is making love to his wife. And then there’s the growing suspicion that this mercurial, brilliant woman, who seems to have as keen an instinct for criminal psychology as he does, might be toying with him; that the accidental death of her husband may not be what it initially seemed.
The picture’s dangerously handsome cinematography, as precise as it is playful, is full of layers and flipped mirror images: the truth is a slippery thing that is hard to pin down within the frame. And Park is gleefully wayward when it comes to placing the camera; in one shot the POV is from the inside of the eye of a dead fish. The score nods to Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock collaborations, but the vision here is Park’s entirely.
