Decision to Leave
“Decision to Leave deftly uses a Korean-Chinese language barrier to heighten the romantic tension between the leads.”
Title: Decision to Leave (2022) / Korean: 헤어질 결심
Director: Park Chan-wook 👨🏻🇰🇷
Writers: Park Chan-wook 👨🏻🇰🇷 and Jeong Seo-kyeong 👩🏻🇰🇷
Reviewed by Elaine 👩🏻🇺🇸
—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 4.5/5
The name “Park Chan-wook” immediately evokes a sense of directorial panache. A man wields a hammer for a hallway fight scene in Oldboy (2003); a woman transforms from saint to avenging angel by tipping over a plate of tofu in Lady Vengeance (2005). Park is hardly the model of restraint, yet Decision to Leave (2022) is the slow-burn neo-noir film only he could create.
It starts with a familiar premise: Detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) investigates a man’s death when he becomes entangled with the prime suspect, the dead man’s wife Seo-rae (Tang Wei). Questions of her involvement or foul play take a backseat to the mystery of their attraction to each other.
Park crafts a masterful spectacle around noir’s worn tropes of femme fatale vs. upright detective hero. He constantly interrogates the viewer’s perception. His characters rarely meet on the same level—quite literally, as detectives talk to each other from different heights on a flight of stairs, and in the middle of the film, Park stages a delightful chase sequence that’s so angled it could have been designed by M.C. Escher.
In less experienced hands, these stylistic choices could come off as more flash than substance. However, it works for Park because each decision is so purposeful. Park layers in motifs that play on how we view things—housewives poke at dead fish eyes while an ant crawls over a dead man’s eyeball, and Hae-jun constantly pulls out his eye drops to clear up his muddy vision. The film starts as a traditional noir, so we inevitably contend with the male gaze (and more on that later), but Park also reminds us of the fallibility of our gaze, a ticklish endeavor for any story.
Park won Best Director for Decision to Leave at Cannes, and it’s easy to see why with his stylish acuity. The film also wouldn’t work without the stunning work of actors Park and Tang who subtly give us just enough to wonder what else is going on in their heads. However, the narrative does lack the propulsive verve of many of Park’s earlier works, and feels at times more like a think piece about the male gaze, or as if Park came up with the ending and worked backward. But it’s rare to find a film that puts together its visuals so meticulously without a whiff of pretension. Park does it playfully, inviting us into his carefully constructed world.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
Writer Jeong Seo-Kyeong has worked with Park since Lady Vengeance, co-writing every feature film (except for 2013’s Stoker), and he’s the better for it. Park has also said of their relationship that “working with her has made me pay more attention to female characters than before.” Decision to Leave is no exception, with several clever, independent women. They don’t talk or work together, but they don’t exist to compete over or serve Hae-jun either. Hae-jun’s wife, Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun) is far from the wronged, forlorn spouse; rather, she takes matters into her own practical hands, whether it’s in proactively seeking out natural remedies to her husband’s woes or leaving him at the end of the film.
Where Decision to Leave really shines is how it subverts the usual noir tropes. Purposefully or not, Decision to Leave recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) where the leading man’s obsession with a woman—and his desire to shape her into an ideal—leads to her destruction. Park’s film appears to start down the same path: Hae-jun stakes out Seo-rae’s house and as he spies on her, he inserts himself into her life, imagines her motivations, and superimposes his ideals on her as well. In one scene, he interprets her movement as crying for her dead husband while we as an audience see she’s actually smiling.
At a clear point in the film, Hae-jun’s gaze changes over to that of Seo-rae’s. Suddenly, Seo-rae is the spectator, the one projecting her ideals onto Hae-jun. She records her observations on a smartwatch, just as Hae-jun did in the first half. When Seo-rae uses the translation app on her phone, in the first half of the movie it uses a male voice and in the second half, it does so with a female voice.
This marks Jeong and Park’s intention to “go beyond that stereotype of film noir women.” Seo-rae might start off as the forbidden fruit who entices the upright Hae-jun, but she’s far more than that archetype. What a joy to witness Tang in this complex role, passionate and seductive, sly at times and startlingly earnest in others. She goes toe to toe with Hae-jun in emotions and intelligence, both of which she uses to solve a case he’s unable to figure out. Furthermore, Seo-rae’s decisions take place independent from Hae-jun. Although she views their relationship through an idealized lens at times, inserting lines from Korean romance movies into their conversations, she never relinquishes control over her own future. Even her ending shouldn’t be seen as a sacrifice for Hae-jun; Park means it rather as her “method of liberation.”
Race: 5/5
While watching Decision to Leave, I couldn’t help but think of R.F. Kuang’s quote: “Translation means doing violence upon the original” (from her 2022 novel Babel). Like in his previous film The Handmaiden (2016), Park employs devilish wordplay. Here, Seo-rae is a Chinese immigrant whose spoken Korean is formal, which she describes as “lacking.” Much has been made about how Hitchcockian Decision to Leave is, yet the interplay of languages here is completely unique, which makes it interesting from a diversity standpoint. Rather than pigeonhole Tang into a vague non-Korean character, or to use her non-Koreanness simply as a way to “other” her, Park has formed a smoldering romance centered on how these two characters communicate (or woefully miscommunicate). For instance, Park shows how Hae-jun is falling for Seo-rae as he adopts her old-fashioned Korean words and manner of speech.
Other small cultural notes add flavor to the film: The song that Seo-rae loves is called “Fog,” and the original song actually inspired the movie. Both the lyrics of the song, as well as the South Korean movie that the song was created for (1967’s Mist) inform the events of Decision to Leave. Also, the book that Seo-rae and eventually Hae-jun read to a grandmother at a nursing home is “The Book of Mountains and Seas,” a Chinese classic text, although translated into Korean here. It’s one of several examples of the Korean and Chinese languages meeting.
Despite our lead characters’ best efforts, their intentions often get lost in translation. Hae-jun teaches himself Beginning Chinese to get closer to Seo-rae, and Seo-rae uses Korean, Chinese, and translated Korean to express herself. However, Hae-jun’s inability to understand Seo-rae’s emotions proves to be the most significant misinterpretation of all, while Park deftly uses their language barrier to heighten both the romantic tension and tragedy of their relationship.
Mediaversity Grade: A 4.83/5
Park’s sophisticated visual language dazzles and smolders, perfectly delivering a noir confection about perception, communication, and the mysteries we leave each other.
Like Decision to Leave? Try these other films that use noir techniques.
Parasite (2019)
One for the Road (2021)
Nightmare Alley (2021)