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
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.