'Decision To Leave' A Review

Decision To Leave is a mystery/drama about insomniac detective Hae-Jun(Park Hae-il) working in Busan and only spending the weekends with his wife in Ipo. An immigration officer dies under mysterious circumstances and he becomes obsessed with his widow who is the prime suspect Seo-Rae(Tang Wei).

The film is strictly demarcated at the 75 minute mark, after which there is a time jump and the tone, editing and narrative drastically shift. The performances obviously are influenced by this. Hae-il and Wei, at the start, give wonderful, layered, odd performances and have great chemistry. It builds in this complicated way and comes to a satisfying conclusion. Then the film continues for another hour and a half in which the portrayals become somewhat farcical as the tone goes full on melodrama and the characters behave illogically. Not a fault of the actors but still a bizarre and ineffective drastic turn.

The production is uneven, visually(at the beginning) crisp with some very effective and evocative editing choices. Scenes bleeding into one another, characters observing other characters or imagining what other characters are doing appearing in those scenes as observers, a character making audio notes serving as narration for the scene we're seeing. It's all very lyrical and transportive and is present throughout the first portion of the film. Bafflingly this technique is abandoned after the time jump. At the start the tone is a weird mix - mystery, romance, procedural, drama- but it works. This delicate dance of genre is jettisoned for daytime TV melodrama halfway through and it becomes plodding, convoluted, and so illogical as to be, not to put to fine a point on it, dumb.

Incredible promise and intrigue deflated to the mundane.

Currently available on VOD.

Stream It(in it's entirety).

See It(stopping at the 75 minute mark).