Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave represents the decline of movies and morality.
One of 2022’s hipster-critic favorites, Decision to Leave, directed by Park Chan-wook, is vibrantly photographed by Kim Ji-yong so that its digital-age setting and surfaces give the impression of complexity. Yet this is one of the year’s most dismaying and repellent movies, confirming that something dreadful is happening — not just in the plot of the movie itself but in how we relate to media: Film, cellphones, and other digital formats put a screen between human relations.
This concern develops from dubious technological progress. Park uses this dehumanizing digital revolution to gussy up his film-noir story: Two South Korean detectives, Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) and Soo-wan (Go Kyong-pyo), investigate a man’s death from falling off a mountain. Based on the evidence found, they are torn between treating the man’s beautiful young widow, Chinese immigrant Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), as a suspect or exonerating her.
Less than original, Decision to Leave is padded out with a series of flashy, elegant grotesqueries. Park follows the zeitgeist trend for gross-out imagery — bugs crawling out of flesh wounds, images of mortal remains — in a soulless realism that counteracts the characters’ romantic attraction. (Think David Fincher’s Zodiac on steroids to approximate Park’s show-offy technique.) Hae-joon’s insomnia correlates to our contemporary alienation, yet rather than explore this loss of sensitivity, Park merely exploits it; he positions sexy Seo-rae as distraction to the detectives’ sense of duty.
As a widow, Seo-rae lacks the proper emotional affect; she was a victim of the dead man’s toxic masculinity and so spurned her husband. Yet Park’s gruesome exhibitionism is indifferent to romantic pathos. He prettifies despair and hopelessness as pop entertainment. (Moviegoers familiar with Asian cinema trends will instantly spot Decision to Leave as a bitter parody of the superior Infernal Affairs, which Scorsese remade as The Departed.)
One of Park’s most ostentatious gambits depicts Hae-joon and Seo-rae’s cellphone communications as physical reality. They appear to be in a room with each other, but this sleight of hand is merely gimmicky, not nearly so moving as similar moments in Julián Hernández’s Dos Entre Muchos that visualized desire between two distant lovers. Park lacks Hernández’s sensual, spiritual longing. Park’s emotional coldness, which has been critically celebrated, confirms that film culture has degenerated.
Decision to Leave’s femme-fatale story twists are not compelling, so why was this bizarre, unpleasant narrative made? Perhaps it’s because Park, a South Korean auteur like Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, is drawn to suspicious and devious narratives that evoke the threat — experienced emotionally — from North Korea. This aberrant version of Stockholm syndrome abandons any moral basis. Or, you might simply decide Park is a talented schlockmeister.
American reviewers who praise Decision to Leave apparently welcome its cynicism and exoticism as something missing from U.S. movies (the same reason Spike Lee did an inferior remake of Park’s masochistic underworld thriller Oldboy). Those reviewers who prefer Decision to Leave over Brian De Palma’s wonderfully complex Femme Fatale (2002) — a film that moved from social transgression to sexual maneuvering to spiritual redemption — show a taste for Millennial decadence. Decision to Leave’s glossy aesthetics are corrupt and sinister.
