From the Oscar-winning Parasite to the runaway streaming success of Squid Game, South Korean pop culture is having a moment – get 'em, get 'em, get 'em – making it the perfect time for the return of Park Chan-wook, the director behind such knotty modern classics as 2003's Oldboy and his previous feature film, The Handmaiden, released back in 2016.
Park's Cannes-winning latest, the achingly romantic thriller Decision to Leave, might come as a surprise to those who recall the director's way with a live octopus and a bloody hammer, but it's no less twisted and provocative in its emotional heft, possessed of a devastating tenderness that snakes its way toward the abyss.
A genre potboiler refracted through the filmmaker's hyper-charged Hitchcockian menace, Decision to Leave is an ostensible detective thriller that tumbles down a rabbit hole of emotional treachery, turning a routine police procedural into a brooding meditation on obsession and the complexities of love.
