Winning the Best Director Award at Cannes, Decision to Leave is a bit like watching Vertigo as directed by Nic Roeg. It has the same tricky brilliance as that director's films of the seventies, the same use of the zoom lens, the flash forwards and intriguing match cuts that bring two unrelated things together. And also that Richard Fleischer-like device of putting a character into a scene they're imagining or witnessing, But its story - a cop becomes obsessed with a woman, who he suspects may be involved in a murder, followed by a part two, in another part of the country, with the same woman, is creepily like Vertigo.
Yes - place. There's that song, isn't there, a suitably haunting one, 'Mist' performed by Jung Hoon Hee and Song Chang-sik, ('I walk alone on the street filled with mist') supposedly written about the gloomy city of Ipo, where the latter action takes place. And Mahler's Fifth, used as a love theme.
Excuse me, I haven't introduced the principal players. Tang Wei is particularly good as the femme fatale, Park Hae-il is the insomniac detective. With Lee Jung-hyun and Go Kyung-Pyo. And the detective who accompanies him in Part 2 - comedian Kim Shin-young in her debut as an actor - offers a touch of humour.
A dazzling experience. Edited by Kim Sang-beom (who has 131 credits on IMDB, one of which is Oldboy) and photographed by Kim Ji-yong.
Talking of Oldboy, the director seems to have calmed down a bit after his success as an enfant terrible - I'm glad to say.
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