Review: 'Decision to Leave' is a delicious mix of romance and film noir, as a detective questions whether a widow is a lover or a killer (or both?)

Somewhere between romantic drama and film noir, director Park Chan-wook’s “Decision to Leave” is its own fascinating beast, melding the dark menace of a murder mystery with the bottled-up passion of a tragic romance.

Jang Hae-joon (played by Park Hae-il) is an inspector in the police department in Busan, Korea, and is quite good at his job, able to cut through any murder investigation in relatively short order. But the case he’s assigned to when the movie begins is a strange one: A healthy 60-year-old man, who likes to rock-climb in time to Mahler’s 5th Symphony (four movements to get to the top, the fifth to stand and gloat), is found dead at the bottom of the rock he was climbing. The signs point to a simple fall, but something to Jang feels a bit off.

Then the detective meets the dead man’s Chinese-born widow, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), and the nagging little voice in the back of his head is drowned out by the beating of his heart. Park stages some playful scenes in which Hae-joon imagines what it would be like to act on his desires. 

He doesn’t, of course, because he’s too proper a professional, and he’s married to a nuclear engineer in Ipo, though they only see each other on the weekends. Oh, and the other reason Hae-joon is slow to make any moves on Seo-rae, is that he hasn’t eliminated her as a suspect. But, as he tells his headstrong partner, Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun), “If she’s young, beautiful and foreign, does that make her a murder suspect?”

I’m going to stop with the plot synopsis here, because part of the thrill of “Decision to Leave” is watching how Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung drop the other shoe — a succession of other shoes, really — gracefully, ratcheting up the tension imperceptibly, until the viewer notices their fingernails digging into the armrest.

This should be no surprise for fans of Park’s previous work — his best-known films to American fans are “Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden” and his English-language debut, the Southern Gothic thriller “Stoker.” But that’s the only non-surprise this movie offers, from its intricate plotting to its daring camerawork to the delicious chemistry between the leads.

Park Hae-il (“Memories of Murder,” “The Host”) and Tang Wei (“Lust, Caution”) are quite sexy together, even as they never get naked and seldom kiss. The repressed desires accumulate in “Decision to Leave,{ building on the tension until it’s unbearable, in the best way romantic dramas and crime thrillers can be.

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‘Decision to Leave’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence and some sensuality. Running time: 139 minutes; in Korean and Chinese with subtitles.