The crime is unfulfilled passion in Park Chan-wook’s decision to leave

On its deceptively clean surface, Park Chan-wook’s decision to go is the story of a detective who obsessively falls in love with a suspect. But that’s like saying Alain Resnais Last year in Mariánské Lázně is about a man and a woman who meet in a hotel. In Park’s first film since 2016 The maid, the devil is in the details – and there are dizzying amounts of them. The South Korean director, working at the top of his game, drops tantalizing hints that are best analyzed in several reflections that can be reported as being very helpful.

its notStop the visual inventiveness emphasizes the longing that Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il, who takes his place among the film noir’s great detective saps) for the possible black widow Seo-rae (an intriguing Tang Wei from lust, caution). They exhibit a seething chemistry in this poignant and almost unfathomable love story in which Hae-joon becomes more mysterious as she learns more about Seo-rae, leading the viewer to constantly question what they’re seeing and hearing. Whether Seo-rae murdered not just one husband but two is immaterial, while Park uses her possible crimes in a way that feels both timeless and decidedly modern to tell a story that’s coolly understated yet forward suppressed desire seethes.

Coolly reserved is not a term one would normally use to describe Park’s work. But here he throws the gonzo violence of 2003 overboard old boy and the greenhouse eroticism of The maid and replaces them with heartfelt emotions that remain forever unspoken as visual viewpoints shift and throw us off balance. The eye drops Hae-joon uses to clear his vision are our first clue that everyone’s perceptions can be easily clouded. He is the youngest ever inspector in the bustling South Korean city of Busan. His wife (Lee Jung-hyun) lives hours away in the sleepy, foggy town of Ipo, so the couple only sees each other on weekends. “It takes murder and violence to be happy,” she tells her husband – and that’s exactly what he gets when a dead man’s body is found at the foot of a narrow, vertiginous rock.

As Hae-joon begins his investigation, Park wrestles his humor from his meticulous and thorough manner, but his deep-rooted need for certainty will battle the irrational needs of his heart when he meets the dead man’s widow. Seo-rae arrived from China years ago under difficult circumstances. She’s prone to proclaiming that her knowledge of Korean is “poor,” which just doesn’t make her seem entirely trustworthy. She’s not particularly sad about her husband’s death either, and when Hae-joon sees the man’s initials literally branded onto her torso, Seo-rae transforms from a pitiful widow into a capital murder suspect.

Seo-rae’s impenetrable atmosphere is enhanced by Park’s ingenious use of technology to show how smartphones can both create distance and bring people together. She often uses Google Translate to communicate with Hae-joon, adding a layer of separation between them. Later, a phone app is used to devastating effect, rocking Hae-joon. Park overdoes his technological hand on the final stretch with a cell phone recovered from his underwater grave, containing so many text messages and voice memos that it almost swallows the film. Park, who never holds an audience’s hand, cheekily addresses the issue with Hae-joon’s line, “Why don’t you answer me directly? This is so frustrating!”

After Seo-rae was ruled out as a suspect, the two continue to see each other, often at his Busan home, which has a whole wall of cold case photos. It’s a memorial to Hae-joon’s relentless drive to achieve closure, and his obsession with Seo-rae is based on the idea that she’s a mystery he can’t solve. As for Seo-rae, she sees Hae-joon as her protector, someone who will “treat me how you want, like you always did… like a suspect”. In order to convey such abstract notions, Park is always inventive in collaboration with the outstanding cinematographer Kim Ji-yong, like when Hae-joon interacts with Seo-rae in her apartment, although he is actually watching her from his car or talking to her that Phone.

Eventually, the plot jumps forward 13 months and moves to Ipo, where Hae-joon has been transferred so he can live with his wife full-time. When they meet Seo-rae with her new husband at a local market, we wonder: did Seo-rae move to Ipo to escape Hae-joon? Or to get closer to him? The answer becomes irrelevant when the new husband dies too, forcing Hae-joon back into Seo-rae’s seductive orbit. Park revels in the Hitchcockian possibilities, both visually and thematically, of all of this. It is supported enormously by Cho Young-wuk’s wonderfully textured score and above all the harmonious interplay of its two main actors. Though many of their feelings for each other go unspoken, their precise movements express their intense bond, as in a masterfully staged interrogation scene that ends with Hae-joon and Seo-rae silently finishing their lunch and the table like a long married couple.

Working to the highest level of craftsmanship and watchmaker delicacy, Park weaves an intricate web in which everything has its place, even seemingly unconnected moments like the well-staged rooftop chase and the delicious, if inauthentic, Chinese food, Hae -joon prepares for Seo-rae. The downside of Park and Jeong Seo-kyeong’s dense and twisted script is that its tragic ending works more on an intellectual, puzzle-solving level than on an emotional one. But with decision to go, Park expands his impressive skills. The film is an understated (for Park, at least) and scrutinizing drama about a man who risks professional corruption and personal destruction by a woman he knows everything – and nothing – about.