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.
It's also a great romance in the truest, messiest sense of the word, giving full scope to all of the unresolved longing that we carry to the grave.
On the bustling streets of Busan, 40-something detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is Park's take on the hard-boiled detective: addled with insomnia, trying to kick smoking, and – as his goofy younger partner (Go Kyung-pyo) likes to suggest – probably addicted to murder cases, so it suits him just fine when a 60-year-old businessman plummets to a suspicious death during a hiking trip in the mountains.
The deceased had everything inscribed with his initials, including, it turns out, his much younger Chinese wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei, the controversial star of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution), a caregiver who seems indifferent to her husband's passing – no surprise, given he'd been knocking her about – and thus becomes the prime suspect in the police case.
For Hae-joon, slowly zoning out of a 16-year-marriage to his beautiful but dull wife (played by former pop star Lee Jung-hyun), Seo-rae becomes the perfect subject for his life of late-night surveillance – and an object of intense fascination, an obsession that Park literalises with some remarkable (if predictably show-offy) sequences that entwine the two characters in a shared cinematic space.
But Seo-rae is no mere femme fatale, the kind that's historically designed to fuel – and then complicate – the hero's journey toward self-reckoning. In the hands of Park – and Tang, who gives a wonderfully enigmatic performance, smouldering with dark disdain – this Chinese immigrant with a layered backstory is the narrative hook that becomes the complex soul of the film.
Park has said that the film was inspired in part by teenage folk singer Jung Hoon Hee's Mist, an eerie lament of loss that was a huge hit in his homeland when he was a boy. And the song, which recurs here, is the film's melancholy heart, a haunting motif of lost love quietly punctuating the filmmaker's trademark formal virtuosity.
Those trickster stylings don't have the bombast of Park's earlier work, but they're just as imaginative, with loopy canted angles and elaborate POV shots – from inside iPhones and, in one hilariously bravura case, a literal fish-eye lens – set to stabbing strings (courtesy of regular collaborator Jo Yeong-wook) that invoke that Urtext of cinematic obsession, Vertigo.
The film's first half, largely set against the dramatically heightened violence of the city, is a playground for Park's formal mastery, but it's the back stretch – involving a move to the seemingly more tranquil town of Ipo – that reveals his deceptive skill for burrowing deep into the hidden emotions of his players.
In this port-side town, with its fish markets and relative quietude, Hae-joon's apparent resolve to make a go of domestic peace is up-ended by the reappearance of Seo-rae, especially when her latest husband – the gormless, self-regarding Ho-shin (Park Yong-woo) – meets the grisly fate of his predecessor.
It's here that Decision to Leave lights the fire under its slow burn, exploding not just the dynamics of obsession but the complicated nature of desire – those feelings that can never really be extinguished, no matter how hard we try.
If the film doesn't strive for the lurid, emotional excess of Oldboy or the erotic melodrama of The Handmaiden, then its punch comes from its relative interiority; the lure and power of the unknowable.
Much of this is the result of Tang's cannily withheld performance, in which she suggests the notion of a woman who becomes an enigma by choice, a character driven to escape those who want to mould her to their desires – that Vertigo feeling again – men whose love can never meet her expectations.
It's a world in which romance, however alluring, is an irreconcilable fantasy.
In wrestling with what compels Seo-rae, Decision to Leave is both an indictment of masculine desire (and its shortcomings) and an empathic treatment of the desire to flee – a recognition that for some, a life in limbo is the only mode of existence; of dealing with the world and its disappointments.
That the film can be all of those things – bleak and fatalistic, faintly damning of love's foolish quest – and have its heart-rending romantic ending, too, is a testament to Park's undimmed talent. Decision to Leave is one of his best.
Decision to Leave is in cinemas now.
