© MUBI
A woman stands in a room, alone. Wallpapered motifs encircle her in a swirl of blue-green something. Are they waves or mountaintops, those shapes repeated into infinity? Maybe they're both, maybe neither. Maybe they're everything.
According to a Confucian proverb, the wise man admires water, the kind man admires mountains. Or maybe it's benevolence and virtue, some other translation across languages. Two complementing sides of the same person, perhaps a binary of human natures, these words reveal more than their scholarly meaning – at least, they do in Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave. Ideas of duality percolate throughout the work, as does the attempt to understand the unfathomable reality of another person. We try to find order in chaos, logic in that which has none, pursuing an understanding that will always be out of grasp. Every single one of us is a mystery to others, and to try to transcend the impossibility of knowing someone else is a fool's errand, the most beautiful thing in the world, ecstasy holding hands with despair. It's love…
Looking directly into the ant-infested innards of Decision to Leave, the viewer is confronted with another duality made one. Just as he has done before, Park Chan-wook marries what, in theory, feels like it should remain apart. A twisty detective story littered with dead bodies and one of the most romantic films in recent memory feel like conflicting ideas. And yet, Decision to Leave is both, following the example of some of the best noirs. To extricate one of these two facets from the piece's cinematic organism would incontrovertibly lead to its death, for romance feeds off mystery, love like a flower that can only sprout from earth watered with blood. Surrender yourself to its story's weird spell, and you might come to see murder as foreplay and evidence tampering as a kindness between lovers.
Perpetually bathed in foggy metaphor, epitomizing style as substance, this tricky tale starts in a conventional procedural fashion. Well, as conventional as a film directed by Park Chan-wook can be. Pops of color are maybe the first directorial touch one consciously registers, from the cornucopia of wallpapers to the humble vitality of tangerine latex glowing in a scene of gray rock and azure air. However, the rhythms are just as intense as the color story, if not more. With a runtime of 128 minutes, you'd suppose Decision to Leave would allow itself to breathe and pause, but the filmmakers have other ideas. Stuffed to the brim with information, the movie's cut like a heart attack, full of short scenes cascading on top of each other with startling smoothness.
There's a hint of hysteria, but such is the madness of falling in love or solving an unsolvable puzzle. That's especially true if you're like detective Hae-Jun, an insomniac Korean detective who's perhaps a bit too attached to his job. He lives in Busan, away from his wife, a nuclear plant worker in the quiet city of Ipo, only occasionally visiting her to cook homemade soup and exchange sweet nothings. At night, he's kept awake by undiagnosed sleep apnea and a wall covered with photos of unsolved cases that haunt his every waking moment, often preferring to spend the sunless hours behind the wheel, stalking suspects, rather than in bed. In this state of neurotic alertness, he comes across a new case for his wall.
The body of a retired immigration worker has been found, shattered dead at the bottom of the mountainside after falling from the top and hitting rock three times. It seems like an accident, though evidence points towards something more sinister, maybe a suicide or murder. The man's wife, Seo-Rae, seems suspicious in that classical femme fatale model. A Chinese immigrant who gained Korean citizenship through her grandfather's wartime efforts, she's a beautiful caretaker who spends her days with elderly women and seems, at first glance, to have a solid alibi. But doubt persists, slowly fermenting into a fixation that leaves Hae-Jun drunk with suspicion. Or is it attraction?
Whether trading morbid memories as foreplay or synchronizing their breaths in the back of a police car, actors Tang Wei and Park Hae-il negotiate the Hitchcockian intrigue of the movie's first half deftly. They play the suspect and investigator with notes of obfuscation and misdirection, touches of clarity here and there to add dissonance to the symphony. In their hands, it's easy to accept that just as food can be a love language, so can death. The pair's work helps make sense of a dense text that often feels on the verge of being too complicated for its own good, a byzantine tapestry prone to unraveling. It feels exciting to watch them go, to witness how Park Chan-wook and his team keep this off-kilter procedural from falling apart.
They do this while maintaining that exhilarating notion that, at any time, a misstep can lead to a free fall into oblivion. It's intoxicating enough to get drunk, and that's before the movie shapeshifts. Suppose the first half of Decision to Leave rings as a classical composition capitulating to unconventional stylings. In that case, its second chapter is a modernist cacophony of messy feelings slowly coalescing into a melody that only makes sense when the last note is heard. Appealing to the structure of Vertigo while inverting the paradigms of its obsessive POV, Park Chan-wook creates an unruly beast of a movie full of exquisite imagery. Every frame is a story told through visual cues that could easily be divorced from the narrative and still feel complete, true, and dripping with savage feeling.
Nevertheless, despite this chimeric wildness, Decision to Leave is as precise as a Swiss watch. Its mechanic brilliance could have led to a cold experience were it not for the emotional plasticity at hand. Beyond the noirish cocktail of murder on the rocks with a shot of passion, there's the zest of unforced comedy to liven up the flavors and the overwhelming aftertaste of tenderness. Gobbling up the movie like ambrosia from the Gods, one finds themselves in a drunken dream about the depths of attachment, the pain of loneliness, and the ache of connection in a world readymade to fragment interactions through technological games of Chinese whispers, a world where we can never known anyone but ourselves. I propose a toast to finding love in a hopeless place, to getting shitfaced while Mahler plays in the background, lovesick in a room covered in mountains. Or are they waves?
Decision to Leave is South Korea's submission for the 95th Academy Awards and is currently in theaters, distributed by MUBI.