Decision to Leave (2022)

Park Chan-wook may well follow in the footsteps of his fellow countryman, Bong Joon Ho (Parasite, 2019) in being nominated for several Oscars come February for his latest cinematic offering. Decision to Leave is already Korea’s official entry into the Oscars for Best International Film (a continuously baffling category) but it does beg the question as to why Chan-wook hasn’t been nominated in the big categories before, most notably for Oldboy (2003) or The Handmaiden (2016). Hae il Park plays a seasoned detective who is already under pressure from his superiors to wrap up a previous case, when he is forced to undertake a further investigation after a climber is found dead at the base of a mountain range. Everything points to a suicide, but after interviewing the dead man’s wife, suspicions are raised at her seeming total lack of empathy and surprise. Tang Wei plays said wife, and is one of the best actresses of her generation, previously astonishing in Ang Lee’s superb Lust, Caution (2007, and arguably his greatest film to date). Here again her performance is flawless, sweeping Park’s Jang into an obsession with his suspect, a relationship that confuses and confounds as much as it intrigues. Decision to Leave has plenty of femme fatale stories to gain influence from, all the way from Detour (1945) to a mini revival of the genre in the nineties with Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) or Disclosure (1994) to name but a few. Chan-wook’s film is a multi layered crime drama also offering plenty of gripping police procedural in a slow paced thriller; one that makes the slow burn all the more effective. Although perhaps not the director's best film to date, it is one of the years’ finest, despite an uncharacteristic lack of ultra violence, a trait that has featured so effectively in Chan-wook’s previous work. 7.8/10