South Korean director Park Chan-wook, conjurer of dark, sexually charged dreams such as “Oldboy” (2003) and “Stoker” (2013), gives us his most Hitchcockian effort to date. One of the music tracks is even entitled “Rear Window.” “Decision to Leave,” is a film noir about a young, married detective named Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) who falls madly in love with a mysterious Chinese immigrant named Seo-rae (a spellbinding Tang Wei), who is probably a murderer. Does he care?
We meet Detective Hae-jun as he and his partner investigate the scene of a possible homicide. A climber has fallen to his death from a great rocky tower overlooking the city of Busan. The detectives interrogate the dead man’s wife Seo-rae, who claims repeatedly and falsely that her Korean is not very good. She has an alibi. But Det. Hae-jun, who is happily married, finds himself completely infatuated. It is a classic case of amor fou, aka mad love. Hae-jun, an audiophile who suffers from insomnia, does not live with his wife (Jung-yi Seo, “Parasite”) and imagines himself with Seo-rae using out-of-body experiences. He also stakes out her flat in his car in part because it is the only way he gets a good night’s sleep. She often wakes him in the morning.
She works as a caregiver and has access to drugs like fentanyl. Sometimes, she eats ice cream for dinner. She smokes, and former-smoker Hae-jun smokes with her. His wife, who works at a nuclear power plant and lives in the seaside town of Ipo, smells the smoke on him, and it’s like she smells betrayal. Courtesy of composer Yeong-wook Jo (“The Handmaiden”), we hear tense strings and playful horns, along with wooden drumming.
