Park Chan-wook’s neo-noir romance Decision To Leave gets an intoxicating trailer
The Handmaiden and Oldboy's Park took home to the 2022 Cannes award for Best Director
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Park Chan-wook’s mystery romance, Decision To Leave, has received a new trailer ahead of its U.S. theatrical release this October. Starring Tang Wei and Park Hae-il, the swooning noir film sets a blossoming romance against the backdrop of a murder investigation.
“Decision to Leave is a story for adults,” Park says in a press release for the film, per Entertainment Weekly. “It’s a love story, and also a detective drama. But what I really want to emphasize is that it’s a story about loss, that any adults will be able to relate to. Rather than treat it as a solid tragedy, I tried to express it with subtlety, elegance, and humor.”
It starts with a death. In particular, one man’s gristly mountainside death. We’re then thrust into the work of a kind, reserved investigator named Hae-joon, where he’s tasked with deducing whether the man’s death was accidental or murder. Hae-joon meets the widow Seo-rae (Wei), whose elusive behavior and shady past rouses suspicion from the investigator’s colleagues, but only draws him closer to her. It’s in shared glances, stakeouts, and interviews where these two court one another.
“I wanted to make something classically refined and fairly quiet where, of course, the characters’ emotions are swirling internally, but on the outside they are quiet,” Park explains in an interview with Screen Daily. “The process of thoroughly investigating a person, getting to know them through one thing after another, is a sort of dating for them. The conversations they have—very dry and with many things hidden—are a sort of process of having closed-door conversations with dual meanings.”
Earlier this year, Park’s work on Decision To Leave earned him the Cannes prize for Best Director. The film’s also been selected as Korea’s official submission into the international film category.
Decision To Leave arrives in theaters on October 14.
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“Decision to Leave is a story for adults,” Park says in a press release for the film
A nice break after all the children’s entertainment he’s famous for.
Made me spit out all my coffee. 😆
I reacted the same way. Because Oldboy is a Jim Henson muppet show, right?!
Korean directors been knocking out of the park (no pun intended) for quite a while now…
So… Basic Instinct without the legs crossing and uncrossing scene? The trailer kinda gives away the killer’s identity?
Sign me up. I love love love his work, and anyone who hasn’t seen the miniseries adaptation he did of John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl should seek it out right now. Every frame is a painting. The composition is just stunning.
With all the press Florence Pugh has been getting recently, I never see this brought up as a credit. TV miniseries are still second class behind movies.
And she’s so, so good in it. To me, The Little Drummer Girl is right up there with Alec Guinness’ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in terms of the best le Carre adaptations. Park Chan-wook did an incredible job and made some really smart choices when thinking about how to adapt a book from 1983 for 2018 audiences. I love le Carre, but some of his characterization of female characters leaves a bit to be desired. Park made Pugh’s Charlie more independent and clever. And the cinematography is stunning—it’s such a stylish work. I’m not sure there’s another director working right now who uses framing and architecture and color the way that Park does. It’s a shame it didn’t do better with American audiences. AMC aired the six-part series as three, two-hour “movies” and I think that hurt it. Each of the six episodes had distinct thematic arcs that I think got lost (and ultimately made each “movie” confusing) when aired smushed together.
Anyway, all this is the long way ‘round to say that I think we’re in a sort of golden age of miniseries right now, where the form is getting more recognition for the things that I does better than either movies or TV. Le Carre adaptations are a good example of this. His novels aren’t suited to feature film length—too much happens. So you get mediocre films like The Little Drummer Girl (1984) with Diane Keaton (LOL, bad casting), or Our Kind of Traitor, which feel really rushed or abridged. Even the solid adaptations like Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor in 2011 or A Most Wanted Man in 2014 feel like they could have used the space of a couple of episodes to breathe a bit more. But miniseries length is perfect. It lets the story unfold, build tension, deepen characterization, and then resolve.
The Handmaiden is a marvel of a movie. This new one might even lure me back to a proper cinema.