![]() ![]() Hae-Joon isn’t ferociously competent in the tradition of Law & Order cops, but distractible and ripe for manipulation in the mold of J.J. It seems odd that murder evidence would be gathered on a personal phone, as it appears to be a readymade way to compromise an investigation, and Park wants you to notice the strangeness of such details, which establish the fragility of our hero. In one of the film’s many evocative images, Park emphasizes flashlights piercing the darkness of woods as seen from a bird’s-eye view, suggesting that the urge to discern the truth is sinister and futile.Īs Hae-Joon snaps photos of the corpse with his cellphone, ants crawl over the dead man’s eyes, a flourish that embodies broken vision while suggesting that the macabre jokester that helmed Oldboy hasn’t left the building. As the police investigate the scene, Park mounts a formalist show that should be the envy of even that master of cinematic murder investigations, David Fincher. An avid climber, Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok), has tumbled to his death from a mushroom cloud-shaped mountain and hotshot detective Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) suspects murder. If The Handmaiden was Park’s riff on the English drawing-room melodrama, Decision to Leave suggests Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as filtered through an anal-retentive take on Law & Order. But while Park promisingly suggests how phones can intensify a modern thriller’s impact, his new film nevertheless succumbs to inertia. Park shows how tone can’t be detected in texts, and how voicemails can be misinterpreted, manipulated, and even come to haunt us once the person leaving the message is no longer in our lives. ![]() Chief among the barriers in this case is the cellphone, as Decision to Leave pivots on texts and recordings and POV shots that embody the corruptibility of technology. Even by Park’s standards, the film twists itself into oblivion, conveying the barriers that exist between characters that are defined by their cultures and statuses. Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave finds the South Korean filmmaker doubling down on his penchant for audacious visuals and intricate narratives. ![]()
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