Before Korean cinema and culture took the western hemisphere by storm, Park Chan-wook had already made a name for himself creating cult classics and bringing attention to his country’s film industry. His 2002-05 “Vengeance Trilogy” – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance – a revisiting of the European revenge film with the 21st century globalization as background, made him a worldwide known filmmaker and a festivals staple.
For the next fifteen years the auteur continued to craft a robust body of work. He developed his own projects like the chilling Stoker or the critically acclaimed The Handmaiden, worked on the TV adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl, as well as producing (Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho) and writing (The Truth Beneath by Lee Kyoung-mi) for other renowned Korean contemporaries. Eight years after his last film, 2022 saw his return with Decision to Leave. One of the most critically acclaimed films of the past year, has been collecting recognitions since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where it earned the Best Director Award.
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As with many others of his, the film guards its secrets with extreme care, and slowly reveals them in moments where they are the least expected. Its slow-burning plot has lots of echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s storylines, making whichever notion of what’s going to happen useless, as it will prove to be something else entirely. Thus, the film’s ending can be surprising and not quite clear; to help explain things, here’s an explanation of what goes down.
What Is Decision to Leave About?
In Busan, Jang Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il), an insomniac but cool police detective who is investigating the death of a man who apparently fell from a mountain top. He becomes increasingly suspicious of Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the deceased’s wife. His suspicion goes side by side with his attraction for her, which begins to cloud his vision as another murder case and the distant relationship with his wife (who due to work lives elsewhere) occupy his mind.
Hae-Joon stakes her house and monitors it every night. While becoming more and more obsessed, his attraction begins to be answered by Seo-rae. As they draw near, he becomes convinced she is not the murder and closes the case. This being over, makes it easier for them to be more sentimentally involved with one another, but a crucial discovery by Hae-Joon draws them apart. More than a year later he has relocated to Ipo to live with his wife. Depressed and tired, he now works at a police department which faces very little high-profile cases, mostly stolen goods and local drama. A now re-married Seo-rae appears in Ipo, causing Hae-Joon to fall again in a web of deception and complicated feelings.
How Does Decision to Leave End?
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At the end of the first act, the detective realizes that through a thoroughly planned scheme, Seo-rae did in fact threw her husband from the mountain top, making feel broken and despaired. Feeling his integrity as a policeman shattered, he steps away from her, handing back the phone she used to climb up (as for the steps count not to be seen in her real one) and asks her to throw it away.
When the action moves to Ipo, the story repeats itself. Seo-rae’s new husband Im Ho-shin, a business investor, is found dead at his home, which causes Hae-Joon to intensely pursue her as the main suspect.
Soon after, a man confesses to the murder. Sa Cheol-seong committed the crime, as his mother was defrauded by the departed, causing her a loss of millions of dollars. He also insists in Seo-rae’s innocence as he placed a tracker on her phone to know where she was in case, he wanted to hurt her husband through her. Hae-Joon meets with Seo-rae at a mountain and confronts her, looking to inquire the real reasons for coming to Ipo, and as to try and find out if she had something to do with this new murder. She tells him that Ho-Shin had discovered a phone recording where Hae-Joon tells her that he loves her, which he can’t recall. When he returns home his wife leaves him, suspecting he’s been having an affair with Seo-rae.
Just when everything seems to be absolutely placid, Hae-Joon finds the phone of Ho-Shin, which had been thrown into the ocean by his wife, so that priorly mentioned audio would not reach Hae-Joon’s wife. After confirming it with Sa, he learns Seo-rae met with his mother on the hospital the day she died. He concludes she slipped fentanyl pills that had been stored in her apartment, as Sa had previously threatened her to murder Ho-Shin as soon as his mother died. Via Sa’s tracker, he follows her down to a beach where the phone is left in her car. In a secluded part of the beach, while the tide is rising Seo-rae digs a pit in the sand and gets in, allowing herself to be drowned and buried. Hae-Joon arrives after this and is unable to find her as he cries and yells for help.
What Does it Mean?
The romantic promise of this seemingly impossible love, is delivered in the most tragic of ways by Seo-rae’s decision to die at the end of the film. At the end of a road, with her love interest again having proof that she has committed murder, or more precisely, that she has facilitated murder, comes her decision to die for a very profound reason.
The first time he got to know about her killing, he ended broken, depressed and in the need to abandon Seo-rae. Her love for him is so intense she can not permit for this to happen again. “The moment you said you loved me, your love ended. And the moment your love ended, my love began.” These words by Seo-rae, said before she walks to her death, refer to the moment in which he left Busan, and she began longing to be with him. Hae-Joon never says explicitly he loves her, but when he asked to throw the incriminating phone somewhere deep into the sea, this spoke directly into her heart. Letting her go, giving her freedom, is a declaration of love which made Seo-rae fall deeply for him.
Back when she began to frequent his apartment in Busan, she played close attention to the fact that all of his unresolved cases are all placed in corkboard. Whenever a case ends, it leaves the corkboard, and leaves his mind, they become part of the past and are no longer something living in his heart and mind. Now knowing that there is no escape, Seo-rae knows, that she too, will be a closed case. The only way she can find, to convey her love and desire to be in his life, is to become an unsolved case. She allows the tide to drown her, letting herself be buried deep as to not be found, just like the phone he asked her to destroy. As her love yells at the top of his lungs and calls for help, she now will forever live in his heart and mind.
