REVIEW: 헤어질 결심 [Decision to Leave] [2022]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 139 minutes
Release Date: June 29th, 2022 (South Korea) / October 14th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: CJ Entertainment / MUBI
Director(s): Park Chan-wook
Writer(s): Park Chan-wook & Chung Seo-kyung

I went through hell because of you. But without you, my life would be empty.

Leave it to Park Chan-wook (and co-writer Jeong Seo-kyung) to make a legitimate crime thriller into a romance. Because that’s what Decision to Leave is. Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t a femme fatale leading the detective (Park Hae-il’s Hae-joon) who’s investigating the case surrounding her husband’s death around in circles. Well. Not completely, at least. She is in some respects. And he gladly lets her despite what his gut might say. But there’s more to it than just that. There’s also the game within the game. The sense of finally being seen. That it arrives under such dark circumstances doesn’t diminish its power.

What Park does is so remarkable because this film never feels as though it’s hampered by tonal shifts. He’s not trying to marry two disparate threads together in such a way that we must lose one to grab the other and vice versa. Death is the catalyst for love. One does not exist without the other, so nothing is out of place. It doesn’t therefore matter how it begins (him finding her attractive, her needing him to believe her innocence) because that which is born out of the connection forming between them is real. So real that it remains overtly unspoken. It’s consummated by chapstick and sushi. Voice notes and inside jokes.

It’s Hae-joon’s sleep patterns that reveal their love. And Seo-rae’s impulsivity. Just because they can’t be together doesn’t mean they don’t wish they could. She asks him once about whether the person you love choosing someone else means you cease loving them and the film becomes the answer that she never receives: No. It doesn’t. You accept reality. You move on. But those feelings don’t simply disappear. They linger in your subconscious. They influence your actions. And they come flooding back the moment your space and time apart abruptly ends, intentionally or not.

The question then is whether you embrace the reunion or fight it. Park and Jeong mirror their story so that which was given the benefit of the doubt the first time around isn’t the second time. And if that benefit wasn’t deserved then, it might be now. Sadly, hindsight colors things just as much as lust. What seems like a trick might be genuine. What seems genuine is probably a trick. And no one wants to be the fool—even if love guarantees they must. They’ll eventually discover their feelings are both too much and not enough, taking control of their lives to the point where they cannot function. It forces them to refuse the happily ever after so as not to destroy everything else.

Except, of course, that it’s already too late. Like a song that won’t leave your head, the idea of being together has imprinted itself. It has left them both incomplete halves of a whole that was “solely” ever formed via its potential. Cop and suspect. Husband and widow. They shouldn’t work. They can’t work. Yet here they are risking everything anyway only to ultimately remember why it was always unattainable. So, while Decision to Leave may not seem as twisted as some of Park’s previous works, it will eventually prove itself worthy to fit his singular oeuvre. Because their love only works from afar. And it only remains that way if coming closer is no longer possible.