At first glance — and it rewards several glances — "Decision to Leave" seems to tell the story of a police detective and the beautiful woman who upends his dull, well-ordered existence. It's a tale of impossible longing, the kind that can undo a marriage, ruin a career and send ordinary people spiraling into an all-consuming obsession.
But given the formalist bent and sensualist fixations of the South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook, you might say this double-decker feast of a thriller is also about a few other things: the lingering scent of skin lotion, the hypnotically repetitive patterns of wallpaper and the glistening sheen on a piece of sushi, even under the hard glare of police-station lighting. Park has a thing for beautiful surfaces and also a thing for seafood, as admirers will know from his 2004 breakthrough, "Oldboy," with its notoriously unsimulated scene of a man inhaling a live octopus. (Harder-core fans might remember "Night Fishing," the fantastical 2010 short he co-directed about a fisherman and his most unexpected catch.)
"Decision to Leave," which won Park a directing prize at Cannes and will represent South Korea in the Oscars' international feature race, is a movie of subtler, more luxuriant pleasures. Compared with that unlucky octopus, the sushi here is both ethically sourced and exquisitely plated. And as the movie's inextricably bound leads, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) and Seo-rae (Tang Wei), enjoy their meal in easy, companionable silence, you'd be forgiven for assuming they were lovers or spouses, rather than a homicide detective and his prime suspect.
