Filmmaker Park Chan-wook, known for his ultra-violent thrillers that helped catapult South Korean cinema onto the global stage, is back with an altogether different work – a restrained yet deeply emotional love story.
Decision to Leave arrives after the world-smashing success of South Korean entertainment, including Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Netflix’s Squid Game, and has been the top-grossing domestic film in South Korea since opening last week.
It stars Chinese star Tang Wei and Korean actor Park Hae-il, who plays a detective investigating a man’s fatal plunge from a mountain. He falls for the victim’s mysterious wife, whom he suspects of being behind her husband’s death.
The film has already won Park the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which had previously awarded him the Grand Prix for his 2003 cult-classic revenge thriller Oldboy. However, unlike many of his previous works, Decision to Leave contains almost no adult or graphically violent scenes.
IndieWire has called it “the most romantic movie of the year (so far),” while early reviews praised it as a gorgeously rendered love story marked by elegance and restraint.
“I agree that it’s a romantic film, and I wanted to make such a movie,” Park said in an interview with reporters in Seoul last month.
The 58-year-old said he started thinking about the project while working on the BBC’s English-language miniseries The Little Drummer Girl. Set against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Park found himself yearning to do something different – away from politics and disputes.
“I wanted to make a film that’s pure – pure in the sense that it is faithful to the basics of cinema as an art form while no elements other than the theme of love get in the way,” he said.
The result is a poetic exploration of time, loss and longing, combining Park’s signature lush cinematography with the audience-arresting sexual tension simmering between the well-mannered detective and beguiling murder suspect.
The two characters are a departure from Park’s previous, more extreme characters – like the repressed Catholic priest-turned-vampire in the horror flick Thirst and a man held captive for 15 years in Oldboy.