The director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden is back with an updated "cop-meets-femme-fatale" film, which is a "gleaming treat", but falters structurally, writes Nicholas Barber.
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Stand back, James Stewart. You too, Michael Douglas. There's a new lovestruck detective in town, and he can fixate on crimes, chase bad guys up staircases and make crucial mistakes with the best of them. The man to thank is Park Chan-wook. Six years after The Handmaiden premiered at Cannes, the Korean director is back at the festival with Decision to Leave, a neo-noir mystery in the tradition of Vertigo and Basic Instinct. He updates the typical cop-meets-femme-fatale scenario with smart watches, Google Translate and various nifty gadgets: I was especially fond of the chainmail glove the detective uses to defend himself from an assailant's knife. Park also freshens up the genre with a host of imaginative shots, intricate edits and fantasy sequences, and he playfully parodies and subverts its tropes. But essentially Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung have made a cracking post-Hitchcock romantic thriller with everything that requires, from intimate interrogations to rooftop chases to people standing on clifftops as the waves crash on the beach below.
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The film's hero is Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), the youngest inspector in Busan's police department. At weekends, this...
Read Full Story: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220523-decision-to-leave-a-cracking-romantic-thriller
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