Decision to Leave 4K 2022 KOREAN Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A detective investigates the death of a man who fell off a cliff. The dead man's widow cooperates with the investigation, but the further the case progresses, the more the detective suspects her and the more he falls in love.

Review 4K Movie

I was really looking forward to this movie and finally saw it at the movie premiere!

The action takes place in Busan, where a policeman named Hae-joon works in a homicide investigation department. The detective is asleep at night as he is constantly being 'monitored' by detailed pictures of victims of unsolved crimes. He has a wife who pesters him with her excessive orderliness and is honored as an idol by his colleagues, but Puck is unable to feel any feedback or gratitude for such adoration. The mountains change everything: a middle-aged man, a professional climber, wearing an outfit with a mysterious acronym, falls from a great height onto the rocks. The same letters are engraved on the body of his wife, the Chinese woman So Rae. Difficulties translating from Chinese to Korean, past secrets, and atypical grieving widow behavior draw Park to the suspect more and more, even when all the evidence points to her guilt and her alibi falls apart.

Knowing director Park Chang-uk's work, the prepared viewer already knows what to expect from his new works. Seasoned connoisseurs have seen how he dashingly transformed standard crime novels into a real revenge extravaganza ('Oldboy', 'Sympathy for Sir/Madame Revenge'), the classic prose of Emile Zola into a tasty vampire drama ('Thirsty'), an art thriller about revenge into 'Vicious Games' and the elegant con of British woman Sarah Waters into a cool thriller ('The Maid'). And here the creative Korean plays with the Hitchcock tricks known from 'To Catch a Thief' and 'Vertigo'. Except that the theme of beautiful fatal strangers manipulating investigators who have lost their heads from passion is only a screen, as the director has staged, first of all, the most unusual romantic film of the year under the guise of a cop simple detective.

But what can I say, a beautiful and dragging movie that makes you think. The more we are immersed in the investigation, the more confused and, like a fly in the web, bogged down in unexpected plot twists. New colorful characters emerge and new facts turn everything upside down. Park Chang-wook masterfully heightens the tension in the film. The acting duo of Tang Wei and Park Hae-il are terrific in this film. They manage to maintain and heighten the sexual tension without a single bed scene or mere episode of nudity. It's simply amazing how much sensuality a trivial use of hand lotion, a meal together or a date in the rain can contain.

Believe me, the virtuoso directing, which absolutely deservedly won an award at the last Cannes Film Festival, focuses on other aspects of the main characters' relationship, which very quickly moves from the 'policeman and criminal' format to the images of two straying souls and their desire to find points of contact.

It is not for nothing that the film cites the famous Confucius saying that the clever find pleasure in water and the humane in the mountains. The antithesis of the free, in perpetual motion, able to bypass any obstacle of the sea and symbolizing the calmness, immobility and fundamentality of the mountains permeates Decision to Leave. These comparisons are here for a reason, and they show us all the attraction and impossibility of the characters to be with each other.

About the 'bad woman' is a fable: the grandson of Mao Zedong called Tan Wei by that name after her performance in the erotic scenes of Ang Lee's 2007 film Lust. Because of that the Chinese government prohibited her filming and cut her out of all movies. What a twist!!! But our director was not afraid and gave the role to her, a Chinese woman, who played her dialect and knowledge of Korean perfectly in the movie. Actress Tang Wei is incredible in the tragic role of a woman for whom what matters is not intimacy, but a sense of necessity, of belonging to someone important. Her So-rae is not afraid of death or punishment, it's as if she is afraid that Hae-joon will lose attention to her once the investigation is over and there will be no more of these secret spying, flirty, almost flirtatious interrogations and everything will just end by itself, leaving only desolation and loneliness.

After admiring such beauties of entourage and nature, (worth a scene under a snowfall in the mountains), it's easy not to notice that 'The Decision to Leave' slightly abuses its aesthetic qualities to cloud the viewer's attention as much as possible. In the end, it is a reverent film about love, where of all the 'vice' is the only chaste kiss. And the decision to leave, after which the detective will never forget his suspect.