Top Movies of 2022: No. 6 - Decision to Leave

6. Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook

The sensual details of Decision to Leave are rarely explicit, however, they are all undeniably erotic. A man, detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and a woman, a murder suspect, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) share a sushi meal. Then they work together, with an unspoken understand, to clean up the table. On the surface, there's nothing here. The detective can explain to anybody that he's just doing a job, just tidying up. But their coordination is too perfect. It all looks rehearsed, too natural, the man's movements leading right to the woman's, as if they've known each other their entire lives.

Park Chan-wook's previous movie, The Handmaiden (the best movie of 2016, btw) showed sexual acts of all kinds. Yet, the hottest moment of that movie had to be the tooth filing scene set in a bathtub, where one character reaches inside another's mouth to perform some amateur dentistry. Chan-wook can perform wonders with simple acts of intimacy. In Decision to Leave, Seo-rae will reach into the detective's pockets and use his chapstick on her lips. Clearly too familiar. It is a line crossed of his biology coming into contact with her own. But still, it's just some lip balm, right? No, this is a red-hot love affair kept quiet, but screaming with intensity. Meanwhile, Hae-jun will go home to be with his wife, Jang-an (Lee Jung-hyun) and they're strangers to each other. It is not lovemaking, it's a routine, like flossing your teeth.

Decision to Leave's actual romance is complicated and perverted. There's a recurring figure in Chan-wook's films: the strange seemingly innocent woman that is much more than she seems. A kind of vamp that the hero ends up loving in spite of - or maybe because of - the manipulation. This is Tae-ju in Thirst, Hideko in The Handmaiden, and in Decision to Leave, Seo-rae. The men in their lives are humiliated and emotionally disintegrated by these women, yet keep coming back for more. 

In this case, Seo-rae's husband has died while rock climbing (if you're feeling any Vertigo, that is not by accident). This seems like a very neat open and closed case of misadventure, an easy one to take down from the big Murder Board. Seo-rae is a Chinese immigrant whose Korean is strategically bad, but her alibi is airtight, and she's even able to help solve one of Hae-jun's other cases for him. Hae-jun seems genre-aware enough to know this is all too neat, a story like this has to have twist, or three, which is what seems to drive him to her in the first place. 

There's a lot of very clever details in the plotting in Decision to Leave. I wish I had caught this detail, more eagle-eyed critics than me noticed this: Soe-rae's apartment has this blue and white wallpaper full of triangular figures. The first half of the movie is all about a murder on a mountain, so you see them as snowy peaks. But the second half of Decision to Leave is all about water: there's a new murder in a pool, and the ending is a heartbreaker on a beach. Now what is that wallpaper? Waves in the ocean. Decision to Leave's structure is one of the more clever narrative machines of the year. Just when you think you have the mystery fully solved, there's another complicating wrinkle, another problem that cannot be solved. Which is exactly what Hae-jun seems to be after.

Decision to Leave is also a gorgeous, damn movie, one of the best-shot films of the year. It is all full of reflections and mirrors and windows. We see Seo-rae's dead husband on the ground with ants crawling over his lifeless eyeballs. Then we cut to the corpse's POV with ants marching across the frame. The windows are often frames to see what is a constructed reality. Hae-jun stalks Seo-rae for the case and imagines himself in her room while watching from across the street. Park Hae-il is even added to the scene of her apartment, signifying his character imagining himself there despite the distance. But you always get the sense that somehow Seo-rae is somehow observing this man back. Even while her back is turned, she somehow can see her man better than he can see her.

While being one of the best thrillers of the year, Decision to Leave also is one of most brutal tragedies. You really wish that Hae-jun could simply renounce policing and join with Seo-rae in a long spree of complicated crimes. But instead he is rewarded with the most devastating unsolvable crime. Seo-rae becomes his perfect mystery, forever stealing his soul to her own.