Tang Wei

In Decision to Leave (2022), Song Seo-rae answers a detective's questions in Korean she has learned, and when a word will not come she hands the job to her phone, which reads her Chinese aloud in a flat synthetic voice. Tang Wei plays every line as a decision. You can see her weigh the word, use it and then watch the man across the table to find out what it has done. She is never quite saying what she means, and the space between the two is where Park Chan-wook's film lives. It is the best thing in a film we rated highly, and the thing we remember.

She has been playing women under pressure to keep something back since Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), where she was Wong Chia Chi and also Mrs Mak, and learned the dialect and the manners of the period to be both. Chinese screens did not see her again until Crossing Hennessy (2010), a Hong Kong romantic comedy, and the same year Late Autumn found her a Korean audience she has kept. After that the career divides neatly. There are the romantic leads of Finding Mr. Right (2013) and its sequels, which audiences took to more warmly than critics did. There is Ann Hui's The Golden Era (2014), in which she played the writer Xiao Hong and which critics also argued over. There is Blackhat (2015), an English-language part that few people noticed, and Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018), an arthouse film with no interest in being easy.

The pattern is plain enough. She is at her best when a director gives her a secret and the time to guard it: Hui, Park, and the two-named woman of Lust, Caution. The commercial films were hits, and critics were cooler on them than audiences were. We have not reviewed them, but charm is the one thing she can do without visible effort, and the effort is the point.

We should own something about Decision to Leave. The second half moves the story to a foggy town and sets up a second case with phones, watches, recordings and deleted files, and we lost the thread twice. The first time we did not mind. The second time we were irritated, and the irritation was specific: Tang Wei was on screen, choosing her words, and we were doing arithmetic. What she does needs the camera to wait on her face while she decides. The plot kept looking at its watch.

Start with Decision to Leave, and when the case gets busy, watch her instead of it.