Park Hae-il

Hae-joon, the detective in Decision to Leave (2022), keeps hand cream in his desk. His shirts are pressed, his wall at home is covered in photographs of the cases he has not solved, and he cannot sleep. Park Hae-il plays all of that without raising his voice once. When the man comes undone it happens in the shoulders, not the face: the shirts stay ironed and the posture goes. He plays the strain by hiding it, which is harder than it sounds.

He has been doing a version of this since 2003. He started in theatre as a child, took a minor part in Waikiki Brothers (2001) and was noticed in Jealousy Is My Middle Name (2003). The same year Bong Joon-ho cast him in Memories of Murder as a factory worker who comes into view late in the first half, and about whom we said as little as we could when we reviewed it. That is the part that fixed his type: a pleasant, ordinary-looking man we are not sure we trust. Bong used him again in The Host (2006), and the decade after took him into bigger films, the rural thriller Moss (2010), the period action of War of the Arrows (2011) and King Injo in The Fortress (2017).

The boyishness has been both the strength and the limit. Early on he was cast for it repeatedly, in Rules of Dating and Boy Goes to Heaven (both 2005), and the reservations about him then were about repetition rather than quality. We have not reviewed those films and will not judge them here. What is clear from the two we have is that the face works best when a director asks it to hide something, and best of all when the something is not guilt but longing.

Which is why Decision to Leave is the performance to start with. It was, by his own account, his first detective in more than twenty years, and Park Chan-wook gives him a scene partner in Tang Wei who chooses every word and hands the rest to her phone. Their first long interview, where Hae-joon lays out expensive sushi as though it were a date and then remembers what room he is in, was funnier and sadder than we had braced for, and by the time he admits he has stopped sleeping we were on his side and knew we should not be. That is Park's doing as much as the director's. He makes a policeman's tidiness look like a man holding a door shut.

He has The Assassin(s) listed for 2026. We would rather he did not go back to playing the nice young man; he is better, and more unsettling, when we cannot tell whether the niceness is the whole story.