Park Chan-wook left the violence out of his new movie so more people would see it

Park Chan-wook has a reputation for making violent thrillers—most notably Oldboy and his other Vengeance Trilogy movies, plus films that blend in dark sexuality like Stoker and Thirst—but his new film, Decision To Leave, is decidedly not that. The film, which is South Korea’s submission to the Academy Awards this year, is a detective movie about a man (played by Park Hae-il from The Host) who ends up falling in love with the widow (Tang Wei) of a man whose mysterious death he’s supposed to be investigating.

It is decidedly not a violent sexual thriller, and in speaking with Indiewire, Park Chan-wook indicated that that is ver much by design. He explained that he’s always considered his movies to be love stories, but, “I realized at one point that nobody has been saying that about my films. They even laugh when I make that kind of comment and take it as a joke.” So, because of that, he decided to look at his previous work and try to figure out why that is. “My assessment was that perhaps violence and nudity were really just at the forefront of everything,” he told IndieWire. “It was just too strong, too graphic.”

For Decision To Leave, he says he “really had to subdue” the violence and nudity in order to “show something different.” He sees the movie as more of a Hitchcockian story than anything else, carefully blending together the mystery and the love story so that they end up being part of “one story.” Indiewire says he’s “wary” of alienating old fans, but he also says it was important to him that teenagers could watch Decision To Leave and that “the adult audience who refused to watch my films before because they thought they were gross or too gory” would feel “invited to come to the cinema” and see this movie at least. He won’t have to wait long to see how that goes in the U.S.: Decision To Leave opens here tomorrow.