Decision to Leave (Dir Park Chan-wook, 2h 19m, 2022)

 That it's taken me over 300 reviews to arrive at the filmography of Park Chan-wook is, in hindsight, one of the top five biggest mistakes I've made in over six years of reviews. Park, after all, has one of the best filmographies of any living director, from the ultra-violent and transgressive Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy & Lady Vengeance) to offbeat comedies like I'm a Cyborg and That's OK and masterfully made, and evocative thrillers like The Handmaiden and Stoker. Alongside his countryman, Bong Joon-ho, the duo have made incalculable strides in making the cinema of their native Korea not only financially successful, but world-renowned.

Fortunately, today, I can redress my oversight, for, on limited release (and of course, UK wide on Mubi), comes his latest film, the masterfully told, exquisitely shot, and beautifully labyrinthine Decision to Leave, a return by Park to the neo-noirish romantic thrillers that pepper his career. A man is found dead at the bottom of a mountain in climbing equipment, and, around the darkness of this sudden and increasingly sinister death, the detective investigating finds himself falling in love with the main suspect, his wife, and inexorably drawn into a-at times bewildering-web of twists and turns as the detective must balance his growing obsession with the woman, whilst hiding his infidelity from his wife, and uncovering the true murderer.

We begin with Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il, probably best known to Western audiences as the disaffected alcoholic Nam Il of The Host), in Busan; wracked with insomnia, and seen tracking down a petty criminal with whom his paths cross several times across the film, he seems at first the model detective, and the model husband, cooking for his wife, and spending time on the shooting range with his colleague. All of this, however, is about to change for, in the first of the film's meticulously painterly shots, of a torchlit forest from above, almost abstract, our mystery presents itself with all the suddenness of its subject's fall. The victim is Ki Do Soo, a keen climber, who has mysteriously fallen to his death from his favourite climbing spot, and left Hae-Jun and his colleague, the younger Soo-wan (Go Kyung-pyo), with a veritable novel of clues, from his stopped watch, and headphones to, atop the mountain, a location the film will return to many times in its slowly unfurling narrative, his other possessions,

As the duo slowly piece together a life in retirement for a former immigration officer, and his mysterious-and seemingly solitary death, so his much younger, Chinese-born wife becomes the focus of their enquiries. Song Seo-Rae (Tang Wei, most famous for her debut in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, but now a stalwart of Hong Kong cinema), soon arouses suspicion, her blasé reaction to her husband's death, as does her heavy bruising, and, most disturbingly, a tattoo of the same monogram that appears on the deceased Do Soo's possessions Hae-Jun soon brings her in for questioning, and begins to look into her job as a nurse for housebound pensioners. At home, amidst a sequence that includes one of a duo of mysterious cinematic visitations that mirror their discussion, with Seo Rae as passive observer, Hae-Jun makes love with his wife, haunted by the case.

So the film slowly begins to unravel the figure of Seo-Rae; from the interview room, we follow her to her livelihood, and, as Hae-Jun watches her through binoculars, which brings to mind the at once voyeuristic and morbidly curious Rear Window, so he begins to blur the lines between detective and obsessive, between passive observer and active presence. This, Park Chan-wook does masterfully, placing Hae-Jun both within the room he is observing Seo-Rae in, and in his car outside. This elongated sequence matches tenderness, and the film's wonderfully detailed, and details-rich shots with an unnerving sense of the forensic eye of the detective replaced with the admiring eye of the would-be lover. It's a remarkably simple but effective visual trick; one point, Park intercuts a conversation between the two Hae-Juns and Seo-Rae, playing masterfully with distance, the figure of Hae Jun standing in the very room in which she attempts to deceive him about the death of her husband. It's, if nothing else, a perfect visual shorthand for the closing net of suspicion.

As the questioning continues, and Hae-Jun's nightly vigil continues, so the picture of a controlling and violent husband comes into focus, with it come more questions about the figure of his wife, from her illegal immigration into Korea, to her connection to a near mythic figure of Korean independence. This, though, is rudely upended, as the duo of Hae-Jun and his lieutenant cross paths with the petty criminal, who makes his escape in a breakneck chase, as information about Sao-Rae's grandfather, and the handheld style almost border on sensory overload, the chase almost collapsing before one of Park's characteristic fight-scenes breaks out. The tables turn, as this time Seo-Rae, unseen in her car, is the voyeuristic unseen spectator, watching him arrest the petty crook, the film flashing back to her eating ice cream during Hae-Jun's subsequent interrogation, the lines between location and time beautifully blurred.

From here, things gather pace, the hidden figure of Hae-Jun overhearing Seo-Rae discuss with her cat that it should bring her the detective's heart, whilst he keeps a feather from the crow she has to bury. However, by this point, the case has essentially gone cold, with Hae-Jun's superior urging him to get the case closed, and even he has to admit that there is little linking her to the case; even the suspicious death of her mother, a moment the film flashes back to-but it is with this revelation that the film begins to upend itself, Hae-Jun confronted by Seo-Rae who reveals that she has been aware of his visits, and provides a suicide note from her husband, beginning to blackmail Hae-Jun with the idea that he spends his nights watching her house, something his wife is not aware of. Through a series of back and forth cuts, the film playing with the very idea of time as Hae-Jun and his colleague discuss the case and get drunker and drunker, Hae-Jun once again returns back to Sao-Rae's house, returns her husband's possessions and announces she is no longer under suspicion.

It is here, as he cooks for her, that the line between detective and romantic interest begins to slip, and the duo, despite the grisly tableau of crime scene photographs, and the many hobbies that he passes time with because of his insomnia, begin to grow closer. Whilst punctuated by violence, as the duo finally catch up with the man they are after, even this becomes part of the duo's budding romance, as they discuss the culprit and his connection to a local woman-a mirror to the entanglement that Hae-Jun and Seo-rae will find themselves in, the crook revealling that he has killed, not for money but to protect the woman he loves-with tragic results.

The entanglement only grows as Seo-Rae appears at his apartment, and begins to slowly dismantle the boards of evidence-to dismantle her case, in short, and burn the photographs, but, at the same time, helps him sleep. Their romance grows in a rainswept temple visit, their chemistry clear, even as Hae-Jun bears his soul to her, and for a few moments, the film steps fully into the romantic comedy, even if their bonding is over deleting recordings from the investigation, and clandestine early morning texting, with the suspicion of his wife growing, in the background and above it all the delicate tones of Jung Hoon Hee's "The Mist", a song from another era, now only known to the elderly that Sao-Rae looks after, that utterly informs the film, and its story of tangled love.

But it is with the discovery of a crucial clue on the phone of one of her patients that his suspicion begins to grow once more, building steadily, irrecoverably, the film once again placing Hae-Jun in events and locations he cannot have witnessed, the detective's eye once again taking precedence as he begins to unpick the exact circumstances of Ki Do Soo's death, and Sao-Rae's involvement in it, in a scene that is as meticulously shot as it is nerve-wracking, with Do Soo's impassive reaction to his death giving way, as Hae-Jun confronts his lover, laying out the evidence against her, before turning on himself, trying to understand how her sabotage of the case has happened, and why he still has feelings for her, leaving her after demanding she throw the phone into the ocean, a conversation that will later come back to haunt him

From here, the film spools outward, like Park's best films always do, the web of deceit, of this tangled romance leading both of its protagonists towards an inevitable denouement, the beauty of the film only heightening as the complex romance between Seo-Rae and Hae-Jun threatens to destroy his livelihood, his marriage and his job, as she lays bare the lines between genuine love and obscured motive, in a denouement that twists, back and forth, as only Park can direct, until arriving at a finale that stands alongside the best of his work. It is a film, as Park Chan-wook has become known for, that perfectly walks the line between romance and taut thriller, effortlessly exploring the matters of heart, and tightening plots in beautifully intricate and immaculately shot films.

That it has taken me over three hundred articles to arrive at his filmography is something I cannot redress, but what I can say is that, undeniably, Decision to Leave was one of the cinematic events of last year, a reminder that Bong Joon Ho is not the only director to define his country's cinema, and an undeniable frontrunner for 2023's best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.. Decision to Leave, though, is more than this-it is a film that through its detective story, with its twisting turns and sudden revelations, and its slowly unfurling romance, keeps you guessing from its first moment to its last, with a rare and spectacular power.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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