M, 139 minutes
5 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
If the director of this moody, compelling murder mystery was inspired to make movies after watching Vertigo, his new film about a detective besotted with a prime suspect shouldn’t surprise us. There have been some arresting and distinctive films along the way from South Korean writer-director, Park Chan-wook, seasoned with eye-popping violence, but his latest film steers largely clear of that and looks every bit the tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic tale of obsession.
After opening among police where we hear that murder cases in town, read Busan, are diminishing, a man tumbles out of the sky, down a rockface to his death. Right on cue. And the subsequent scenes when police arrive are so Park Chan-wook. Pure spectacle with a hint of grim humour, instilling the kind of horror and fascination you might recall during his film Snowpiercer. That jokey distancing that may or may not help make the queasy trauma of it all easier to watch.
In place of Kim Novak’s sculpted, blonde as the obscure object of desire in Vertigo, we have Chinese actor Tang Wei (Lust, Caution), whose sensuous, alluring presence is perfect for Seo-rae, the widow questioned after the body is found in the mountains. In pleasant Jimmy Stewart’s place, we have Park Hae-il as Hae-jun an insomniac detective who does the stake-outs because he is always awake. He has a weekend relationship with his wife who works at a nuclear plant in another city, Ipo.
The married couple get together on weekends when he prepares delicious soups, refusing the prepared sushi option in favour of spending more precious time together. The take-away convenience idea is carried forward in Detective Hae-jun’s interrogations of murder suspect Seo-rae, who he falls in love with over take-away meals and in the absence of sex, except for a single, vertiginous kiss.
There are many witty symmetries from Park in this beautifully realised mood piece
Hae jun and Tang Wei in Decision to Leave. Image courtesy Madman Entertainment
If Hae-jun has odd and inflexible ways of going about his police work, then Seo-rae’s attitude to her husband’s violent end is difficult to read. Is she crying, or is that a faint smile on her face? Even the colour of the clothes she wears can elude definition. Ambiguity prevails.
There is a suggestion that Seo-rae’s husband may have committed suicide after taking bribes in his job. The semi-retired 60-year-old was an immigration official tasked with interviewing people who had sought illegal entry. But it seems there is more traction in his widow’s strange behaviour. The absence of an emotional response to the loss of her husband that immediately puts her in line of sight of the investigators.
It is also difficult for her that she is or Chinese origin, and without full command of Korean, which makes her vulnerable to misinterpretation. The police officers themselves question their own interest in a suspect who is young, beautiful and foreign, however she had told them that she worried her husband would die in the mountains, ‘at last’. Was it a revelatory detail, or a mistake by a person speaking a second language? And there are also questions, it seems, around the circumstances of her own mother’s death. Where did the rest of that fentanyl disappear to?
In its answers to the mystery, Decision to Leave offers multiple viewpoints through split screens with viewpoints offered by computer desktops and reflecting surfaces like mirrors. Even the crook of Hae-jun’s arm frames another diverting point of view that contributes to the film’s perpetually shifting ground, before the finality of its denouement.
The moment you think you know, the ground is swept from under you, like sand from the shore
We are in good company with our detective popping drops in his tired eyes, and peering at Seo-rae at work through binoculars. The obsessive music of Mahler’s Fifth, so memorably deployed in Death in Venice is in our ears, and there is also a cheeky wave to Play Misty for Me, another tale of obsession. But let’s leave it at that.
This swoony romantic drama, bookended by a shocking death in the mountains and a similarly shocking death by the sea, is made with a surprisingly romantic sensibility. The director’s inventive filmmaking, his wit and skills were very clear before now, but Decision to Leave shows another side to him altogether.
First published in the Canberra Times on 22 October 2022. Jane posts her reviews on Rotten Tomatoes too, as a Tomatometer-approved critic