Our take
A twitchy, uncomfortable noir film for the digital age, Decision to Leave blends the trappings of a restless police procedural with an obsessive forbidden romance. Here, director Park Chan-wook flips every interrogation and piece of evidence on its head, pulling us away from the whodunit and towards the inherently invasive nature of a criminal investigation. It’s a movie that remains achingly romantic even if everything about the central relationship is wrong. For detective Hae-jun and suspect Seo-rae (played masterfully by Park Hae-il and Tang Wei, respectively), the attraction between them is built entirely on distrust and suspicion—illustrating the danger of falling for the idea of someone rather than the person themself.
What it won
Cannes
1 win
Golden Globes
1 nom
BAFTA
2 noms
Nat. Board of Review
1 win
The story
From a mountain peak in South Korea, a man plummets to his death. Did he jump, or was he pushed? When detective Hae-joon arrives on the scene, he begins to suspect the dead man’s wife Seo-rae. But as he digs deeper into the investigation, he finds himself trapped in a web of deception and desire.
Elsewhere
"Having been twisted into bewildered bits by the convolutions of Park’s narrative, I was astonished, toward the end, to find it brushing against the tragic."
— Anthony Lane
"Its themes of impossible romance and the internal conflict between desire and morality make it a captivating addition to Park's filmography..."
— Hannah Strong
The details
Streaming arrival
Who picked it
Emil Hofileña is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. He also writes as a theater critic, with work published in Rogue and Out of Print, among others. He’s probably crying over a movie or an episode as we speak.
