An article from Esquire that was just published a couple of days prior to me writing this review had the headline: "Decision to Leave Is Too Good for the Oscars".
It wasn't presented as a question, but a fact.
When Decision to Leave managed to not gain any traction in the major categories and then got snubbed from the Internation Feature nominee list, it did come as a bit of a surprise.
Instead, All Quiet on the Western Front managed to usurp a lot of the "foreign film" buzz and that isn't exactly surprising considering war films are more palatable to voters.
However, I think there is certainly room for both. I also say that as someone who has been relatively underwhelmed by a lot of the film output I have seen from 2022.
There are only a small handful of films I have seen this year that I think deserve to be mentioned as a worthy selection for my top 10 list of best films.
Decision to Leave will be on my list...and probably on the higher side.
It does kind of surprise me how this film didn't manage to gain as much traction as, say, Drive My Car. I say this as someone who really did love Drive My Car, but it was a very slow moving and quiet 3-hour film.
You could argue that it had a layer of pretention as it heavily featured the concepts of grief and philosophy and the works of Chekhov. Whereas Decision to Leave is a detective story layered with a sensual undercurrent. While watching it, I was definitely reminded of a lot of neo-noir films of the 70s/80s.
The film definitely feels a lot like the work of Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden, the Sympathy movies), but you can clearly see his influences here.
Before delving into the neo-noir inspirations, you can clearly see Hitchcock elements in the film...particularly that of Vertigo. A lot of the sensual elements feel straight out of the works of Brian de Palma or something like Body Heat, and these were films that never seemed popular in terms of "prestige awards" but they often linger on the fringes.
I also felt like the way that Park framed a lot of his actors' faces was frequently reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman, who wasn't one for detective dramas but a director who was keen into tapping into stories of human obsession.
The film begins with a Busan detective named Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) who suffers from insomnia and only commutes home to see his wife Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun) once a week in Ipo.
Hae-jun and his partner Soo-Wan (Go Kyung-pyo) come upon a case where the dead body of a retired immigration officer is found at the bottom of a mountain he was frequently known to climb.
He was married to a much younger Chinese woman named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), who works as a caretaker for senior citizens. She instantly becomes the main suspect due to her lack of emotional response and certain markings on her body, such as scratches, that may show an effort/struggle might've occurred.
Hae-jun does multiple interviews with her and does frequent stake-outs outside her apartment and soon develops a deeper interest and fascination. The intrigue that Hae-jun feels for Seo-rae is where the film starts to take on something of a Vertigo-esque vibe, but I just marveled at a lot of the quick twists and turns that came forth within the plot.
I am choosing not to go into spoilers with this review, as I would hope more people will check out this film...and to be fair, I think a seductive detective story is the kind of film that could pull in filmgoers who are less susceptible to wanting to read subtitles.
I will state right off the bat that the film doesn't quite hit the same heights as a lot of Park's previous work or even some of the other famous Korean works of recent years like Burning and especially Parasite, but a lot of these films are of a pretty high standard. I still think despite that marker, Decision to Leave is of a very high standard as well.
This film feels so vibrant and alive, which is sort of impressive considering it is a detective story. With the romance angle, it also reminded me a little of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love with how the two leads were frequently filmed.
When I mentioned certain similarities to Bergman earlier, I often noticed this within the cinematography. Beach scenes felt reminiscent of The Seventh Seal while the mirrors in many of the interrogation scenes made for creative framing shots that screamed Bergman.
Performance wise, the two leads are definitely splendid together and their chemistry is certainly palpable. Park Hae-il does a wonderful job as the sleep-deprived obsessive detective, but as the femme-fatale/romantic interest, Tang Wei steals the show and it is a truly a shame that she was never even close to being in the running for a nomination (even though Cate Blanchett has brought her up in speeches multiple times along with the likes of Andrea Riseborough...and of course, she managed to cinch the nomination).
This is a truly handsome film to look at. Everything about it feels so strategic, but it is also very playful and oblique one second, and bleak and heartbreaking in others.
I think that it is sort of an unfortunate thing that this film ended up slipping through the cracks in terms of major attention, but I get the sense that it will find its audience over time.
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RATING: ****1/2 out of *****
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