Decision to Leave (2022, Park Chan-wook) (Patreon)

75/100

Can't speak with any confidence until I've seen the other 19 films, of course, but it's hard to believe that the Cannes jury erred in awarding Best Director to Park. For the first hour, in particular, this cat-and-mouse thriller/melodrama sustains a staggering level of formal dynamism; while a few shots are aggressively bizarre (the POV from within a corpse's eyeball, as blowflies crawl across the sclera), most merely employ striking compositions, making even something as mundane as a woman brushing her teeth in a police-station bathroom look almost epic. To spin your head further, Park and his longtime editor, Kim Sang-beom, employ an editing style that's expressly designed to disorient, eschewing not just establishing shots but virtually anything that could serve as connective tissue. It's a perpetual feeling of "Where are we and what's going on?", insanely potent during the long early stretch when both questions apply equally well to the narrative. Eventually, a sort of reverse Vertigo emerges, re-imagining Judy as the prime mover; don't want to go into detail right now, since few will have a chance to see this for a while (and I'll definitely be revisiting it within the next few months), but suffice it to say that 15 years after Lust, Caution, Tang Wei has finally been given another role equal to her steely charisma. Indeed, the film's main problem is that Tang acts circles around Park Hae-il (previously best known to me as The Host's ne'er-do-well son), who has a regrettable tendency to telegraph emotions at times when opacity would better serve the character. (Plus the filmmaking's doing that work.) By and large, though, this felt like a tonic after eight months in which I hadn't really been excited by anything new. Apparently it's a mild disappointment to folks who revere Park's perversity—violence occurs offscreen, barely glimpsed in flashback, and The Handmaiden's almost-explicit sex has been replaced by vintage-noir sexual tension—but I've always preferred Joint Security Area to the Vengeance films, didn't feel a loss. More after it opens, perhaps, as I'm eager to dig into the way that Decision inverts Vertigo's anguished masochism. That's where the perversion lies here.