Park Chan-wook Leaves You Hanging

The director’s latest film is a murder mystery turned love story, but that doesn’t mean he’s left extreme violence behind.

- ALISON WILLMORE

Park Chan-Wook knows he has a reputation for shock. The South Korean filmmaker vaulted into international awareness in 2003 with Oldboy, a lurid, exhilarating revenge drama about a man who’s inexplicably held prisoner by an unknown captor for 15 years, then just as inexplicably set loose. His subsequent work has ranged from a romantic comedy set in a psych ward (I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK), to a perverse family portrait (his first and, so far, only English-language film, Stoker), to the lush erotic thriller The Handmaiden, set in Japanese-occupied Korea. ¶ His latest film, Decision to Leave, is restrained in comparison, a love story tucked inside a murder mystery: It stars Park Hae-il as Hae-joon, a devoted Busan cop, and Tang Wei as Seo-rae, a Chinese home-care worker whose husband dies in what may or may not have been an accident. Park, who’s currently directing an HBO series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, spoke to me through an interpreter about being a filmmaker who’s always had an interest in the mechanics of cross-cultural communication. “When you’re having a conversation, it’s not just about the definition of the words,” he said. “It’s only when the emotion kicks in that you actually get a full picture of what a person is conveying.”

You're a Hitchcock fan-is it fair to say that Decision to Leave is your Vertigo? There are plenty of similarities, from the bifurcated structure to the mysterious wife and dedicated cop to the fear of heights.