Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
It seems like every single time that Park Chan-wook releases a new film, he’s got a genuine surprise in store for us. Park’s last release, the Amazon-produced The Handmaiden was one of those indescribable projects that almost every single person tried and failed to summarize in the months leading up to its release (and how exactly are you supposed to, given all the wild shit in that movie) was a departure from Stoker, his American Gothic drama, and that in turn was a departure from the film’s he’s best known for: the Vengeance Trilogy, of which Oldboy is the most visible and memorable. And his latest, Decision to Leave, is no exception, given that it’s a full tonal departure from a lot of his work. Sure, it’s a crime-centric “thriller” about a detective attempting to find out if a suspect really murdered her husband, but it’s also… an out-and-out comedy? Whatever you’re thinking Decision to Leave is, it’s not, but its plentiful narrative surprises, joyous and wry humor, and delightful performances make it for sure one of the best films of 2022 so far. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it should have, perhaps, won the Palme at Cannes instead of Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness: it’s certainly one of the best releases to emerge from that festival line-up.
Decision to Leave plays like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, but if Cary Grant – circa North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, in full-on comedy mode rather than the stylish dramatics he showed off in Infamous with Ingrid Bergman – were put in the kind of role Hitch reserved for Jimmy Stewart, with Grace Kelly as his winsome and affably mysterious femme fatale. Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is a detective who is perpetually on-the-move: he’s an insomniac, and can’t really get any decent sleep unless he’s able to put his cases behind them. A long tally of unsolved cold cases keep him up at night, and it’s slowly harming his relationship with his “weekend wife,” who lives out of town and who he’s only able to see on the weekends. In the course of his investigation of a gangster’s murder, he’s called to take on another case: that of a dead mountaineer, whose body was found at the base of a large cliff. His partner thinks it’s an accident, but something about the case pokes at Hae-jun, especially when he meets Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the deceased’s much-younger Chinese wife, who acts unusual during interrogation. She’s cool and collected, and claims that it’s because she’s not particularly good at speaking Korean, but the specifics of her speech – turns of phrase that only native speakers would ever consider using – spark something strange in Hae-jun. He suspects her of being a Black Widow, who murdered her wealthy husband for the money following a fight, but he also begins to slowly fall in love with her, discovering that, on his nightly stakeouts, he’s able to fall asleep while listening to her voice. Next thing he knows, he’s cooking dinner for her in her apartment, and she’s telling him that she’ll help him sleep by tackling his case files, and their entanglement only grows more intense as the case heats up.
Tonally, it’s quite reminscent of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, in how its crime elements blend into a interesting and heterodox romance, but the added dimension of the humor, broader and more frequent than in Wong’s film, is the unstable element that makes it feel so radical in comparison to Park’s other work. All of his movies have been funny, to whatever tiny extent, but this takes the surprised laughter one might have found during The Handmaiden – guffaws mainly from the unexpected revelations you’re seeing on screen rather than intended humor (and I definitely don’t think that reaction is unintentional) – and multiplies it by a thousand, genuinely set-up jokes. You keep waiting for the film to take a precipitous turn towards the darkness that we. rightly or wrongly, associate with his filmography, but it never quite gets to that same level. And this is brilliantly executed, given how deeply moving the film’s ending is, and any step further off the path there might have diluted or dulled its impact. There are too many brilliant gags to spoil, so I won’t go into them at large, but to emphasize its effect: Park managed to turn a TIFF Press and Industry screening – normally tidy affairs where publicists walk out the whole time and it’s defined by its chilliness to certain genres – into a howler monkey convention.
Decision to Leave is a virtuoso performance, using all of the skills that Park has acquired in his quarter-century of filmmaking, but showcases the hungriness of an artist who’s never content to just rest on his laurels and let the praise and awards roll in. His action scenes are wonderfully executed, if a bit understated, and well-blended with the comedy; the editing is phenomenal, with lovely collage-style cross-fades depicting our character’s mindset at a given moment (Hitch, again, would be proud), and the film’s two leads are perfectly cast, with it forever being a mystery how Tang walked away from Cannes without the Best Actress award. She’s a perfect cipher, whose feelings are constantly juxtaposed with her suspected actions, and Park’s greatest success is carrying over the intangibles of her performance to the film’s tone at large. It means what it says and feels what it feels, but there’s an intangible grand plan just beyond the horizon, a trap you fall into along with our lead as he descends into love’s strange abyss.