Decision to Leave

Park Hae-il and Tang Wei

A cop falls disastrously for the woman he is certain killed her own husband in Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden. Decision to Leave is an erotic noir mixing elements of the “useless cops” comedy of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder with the romantic obsession of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and adding byzantine, gothic plotting that’s all Park’s own. It wouldn’t work as well as it does without the presence of Tang Wei, playing a femme fatale of a noirish stripe – slinky, possibly dangerous, magnetically attractive – and the grieving widow of a much older husband who’s died in a bizarre rock climbing accident. Is Seo-rae grieving enough though? Or even … Read more