Decision to Leave
Hae-Joon, a seasoned detective, investigates the suspicious death of a man on a mountaintop. Soon, he begins to suspect Seo-rae, the deceased's wife, while being unsettled by his attraction to her.
- Released:
- Runtime: 120 minutes
- Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
- Stars: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il, Lee Jung-hyun, Park Yong-woo, Go Kyung-pyo, Jung Yi-seo, Lee Hak-joo, Jeong Ha-dam, Lee Yong-nyeo, Jung Young-sook, Kim Shin-young, Park Jeong-min, Yoo Teo, Go Min-si, Seo Hyun-woo, Yoo Seung-mok, Kim Do-yeon, Jeong So-ri, Shin An-jin, Cha Seo-won, Joo In-young, Choi Sun-ja, Jin Yong-uk, Choi Dae-hoon, Kim Mi-hwa, Kwak Eun-jin, Ahn Seong-bong, Kim Gook-jin, Kim Sang-hyun
- Director: Park Chan-wook
Comments
- alcerto - 10 January 2023
Masterpiece
Park Chan-wook's is on a level of his own. Decision to Leave is a noirish romance with amazingly inventive shots, which impact and add to the narrative itself. Cinematography is predictably gorgeous and Tang Wei as the ambiguous femme fatale has the ideal face and mannerisms of inscrutable mystery. She's 100% captivating every second she's onscreen.
Decision to Leave also has some surprising wry humor and it manages to use technology as an element to push the story forward and even makes cellphones, smart watches etc almost characters in the movie since they often have a perspective of their own and reproduce messages and voices that seem at once poignant and surprising. OST is also excellent, likewise the believable way every single character is written and interpreted by the excellent cast.
Best movie of 2022. - nikitalinivenko - 26 December 2022
Park's Back
Decision To Leave is Park Chan-Wook's best movie since Oldboy, but there's a caveat. The framing is pleasing, the look is good, and Decision To Leave is by far and away the year's best edited movie (seriously, that editing!). It, however, gets zero points for plot. The story is plucked right off the dusty stock shelf: A murder's committed and the detective assigned to investigate falls for the victim's Femme Fatale wife, to the point he's willing to jeopardize his career to cover for her; and no matter how much you gunk the movie with pretentious symbolism (Those safe, stable mountains! That wishy-washy sea!), if anything it makes the stock-in-trade formulaic outline more tiresome. Fortunately, the technical aspects more than compensate. It's been six years since The Handmaiden (a critical darling that, I'll be honest, I remember almost zero about, since I found it one of those boredoms so stupendous it humbles, and struggled to retain any of it) but directionally, Park is still at the peak of his prowess. A damn good movie that, though personally, left something to be desired - and seemed longer than it is (and maybe went on a bit longer than it needed to, given the aforementioned familiar plot) - is, more or less, still alright to piss away a few good hours on, especially given how long it's been since Park was last at it.
6.5/10.
