Park Chan-wook’s quietest film is a murder inquiry with a love story where its case should be, and the love story is the best thing he has made in years. The second half ties itself in plot it does not need; Tang Wei and Park Hae-il untie it.
Park Chan-wook is the man who gave us the corkscrew in Oldboy and the octopus in The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave has almost no blood in it. A body at the foot of a cliff, a bruise or two, and that is about all. It is a detective story in which the detective falls in love with his suspect, and Park treats the falling with the same care he once gave to hammers. It is his best film since The Handmaiden, it runs 139 minutes, and it is about twenty of those too clever.
Hae-joon, played by Park Hae-il, is a good policeman and a tidy one. He keeps hand cream in his desk, his shirts are pressed, his wall at home is covered in the photographs of cases he has not solved. He cannot sleep. Seo-rae, played by Tang Wei, is the widow of the man on the rocks, and she answers his questions with a politeness that never quite becomes an answer. Their first long scene together is in an interview room, where he lays out expensive sushi for her as if it were a date and then seems to remember what room they are in. We found it funnier and sadder than we expected, and by the time he admits to her that he has stopped sleeping we were on his side and knew we should not be.
Kim Ji-yong’s camera is the film’s other detective. When Hae-joon watches Seo-rae’s flat from across the road, Kim puts him beside her, standing at her shoulder while she eats, so that the stakeout looks like the cohabitation he is imagining. The camera looks out from a dead man’s eye, from the screen of a phone, from inside a fridge. Kim Sang-bum cuts on matched actions, her spoon going up as his eye drops go in, so two people in different buildings seem to share a table. It is showing off, and it is also exactly how obsession feels from the inside, which is why we forgave it.
Ryu Seong-hie’s production design gives Seo-rae a flat papered in mountains, in a colour the characters argue about: he says blue, she says green, and Kwak Jung-ae dresses her in the same undecided shade. Hae-joon’s flat is clean and grey and full of pins. Cho Young-wuk’s score is mostly strings that rise towards something and stop short, and Park leans hard on an old Korean ballad called ‘Mist’, which turns up more often than it needs to and works every time.
Tang Wei is doing something difficult here. Seo-rae’s Korean is learned, and Tang plays a woman choosing every word and occasionally handing the job to her phone, which reads out her Chinese in a flat synthetic voice. The gap between what she means and what comes out is where the whole film lives. Park Hae-il’s unravelling is a matter of posture: the shirts stay pressed, the shoulders go. Lee Jeong-hyeon, as the wife who talks about sex the way other people talk about vitamins, has a thankless part and is drily good in it.
The trouble arrives with the second half. The story moves to Ipo, where the fog comes in off the sea and nobody can see across a car park, and the script by Park and Jeong Seo-kyeong sets up a second case that echoes the first with the variables changed. This involves phones, watches, recordings, deleted files and a number of things we will not describe. We lost the thread twice. The first time we got it back and did not mind. The second time we minded, because Tang Wei was on screen and we were doing arithmetic.
Most critics have liked this film, and a few have found it cold. We think the few are wrong. It is the warmest film Park has made, and the coldness they are describing is the plot, which is a different thing. The debt to Vertigo is plain and unhidden: a policeman, a woman who may not be what she says, a second act that replays the first. Park is not embarrassed by it and neither were we.
The last scene we will not describe, except to say that it moved us more than the preceding half hour had earned, and that this is both Park’s point and his problem. See it twice. The first time for the case, the second for what is happening in the corners of the frame while the case is being explained.
