Female Film Critics 24/375
Korean director Park Chan-wook, who earned a best director award for this film at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, packs several twists and engrossing camera work into this murder mystery, but also an elegiac romance. Think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and how the femme fatale eventually became obsessed with the detective obsessed with her.
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Decision to Leave profiles a South Korean detective’s obsession. What subjective filters cloud any attempt to discern the truth of events, much less throughout an investigation by an experienced, self-aware South Korean homicide detective Jang Hae-joon? That’s the intriguing question director Park Chan-wook answers in exquisitely complex fashion in Decision to Leave. The catalyst for Hae-joon’s immediate crisis is a dead businessman discovered at the foot of a mountain.
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It’s been six years since Park Chan-wook swept audiences away with his lush, seductive The Handmaiden, but his recent Cannes Best Director award for his latest film Decision to Leave shows it was well worth the wait. A Hitchcockian crime thriller/romance right down to its core, all the signature traits that have wooed audiences around the world to the master Korean filmmakers work and garnered him the reputation as one of the best directors working in cinema today here abound. Elegant cinematography, complex characters and a curious tonal tug-of-war between a range of different emotions are again at the helm here in this tale of a homicide investigator who falls in love with a murder suspect.
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At his Jerusalem Film Festival Masterclass, Korean filmmaker Park Chan Wook focuses on his genre bending storytelling and cinematic trickery in Thirst, which is, he says, his personal favorite of all the films he’s made to date. He comments that he identifies with the film’s central character, a priest-turned-vampire, because he’s always trying to justify his actions. He revelations about audience manipulation through sound design are particularly fascinating. Read more>>