Decision to Leave
別れる決心
The Moonlight essay
CinemaDecision to Leave and the Beautiful Danger of Desire Fed by DistanceRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
A detective falls for the widow he is investigating; the most erotic film of its year has almost no sex in it.
Jang Hae-jun is a meticulous, sleepless detective in Busan who sees his wife, Jung-an, only at weekends. When Ki Do-soo, a retired immigration officer, is found dead at the foot of a mountain he liked to climb, suspicion falls on his much younger wife, Song Seo-rae, a caregiver who emigrated from China and shows little grief. Hae-jun interviews her again and again and watches her apartment through the night, and he falls for her. She knows he is watching. Her alibi holds, one of her husband's letters reads like a suicide note, and Hae-jun closes the case as suicide, over his partner's doubts.
They grow close. Then, standing in for Seo-rae at the home of an elderly client with dementia, he finds that the housebound woman owns the same phone as Seo-rae and that it logged a climb of 138 flights of stairs on the day of the death. Seo-rae had swapped phones, slipped out of a back window and pushed her husband from the mountain. Hae-jun tells her she has destroyed his pride in his work, and in the same breath tells her to throw the phone into the sea.
Thirteen months later, sleepless and depressed, he has moved to the coastal town of Ipo to live with Jung-an. At the fish market he meets Seo-rae with a new husband, Im Ho-shin, who is found dead in his swimming pool the next day. A young man confesses to killing Ho-shin for swindling his mother, but Hae-jun learns that Seo-rae visited that mother in hospital on the day she died. Jung-an, suspecting him, leaves. On the phone Seo-rae tells Hae-jun that Ho-shin had found a recording of what she heard as his declaration of love, and that she began to love him at the moment he stopped loving her. At the beach Hae-jun finds her empty car and the phone that holds his cover-up. Further along the shore, Seo-rae has ended her life where the incoming tide will hide her. He searches the beach calling her name, never knowing how close she is.
Starring
Tang Weias Song Seo-rae
A caregiver who emigrated from China, the widow Hae-jun is sent to investigate and cannot stop watching.
Song Seo-rae’s story
Seo-rae came to Korea from China after helping her terminally ill mother to die, at her mother's request. She works as a caregiver and is married to Ki Do-soo, whose initials are tattooed on her, the monogram he put on his belongings. She pushes him from the mountain, having swapped phones with a housebound client for an alibi, then answers the detective's questions calmly, sees him watching her through the night and lets him come close. When he covers for her, she hears his words as a declaration of love and keeps them on the phone he told her to destroy. Thirteen months later, married again, she tells him she began to love him at the moment he stopped loving her, and ends her life on the shore, where the incoming tide will hide her.
Park Hae-ilas Jang Hae-jun
A Busan detective with chronic insomnia and a pride in his work that the case takes apart.
Jang Hae-jun’s story
Hae-jun is a Busan detective who prides himself on being thorough, cannot sleep, and sees his wife, Jung-an, only at weekends. Night after night on the stakeout he falls for Seo-rae, and he closes her husband's death as a suicide over his partner's doubts. When a phone shows him that she did it, he tells her she has destroyed his pride in his work and, in the same breath, tells her to throw the evidence into the sea. Thirteen months later, depressed and still sleepless, he has moved to Ipo to live with Jung-an. Seo-rae arrives with a new husband, who is killed; this time Hae-jun follows the case to the end, and Jung-an leaves him. He is last seen searching the beach, never knowing how close she is.
Lee Jung-hyunas Jung-an
Hae-jun's wife, who works at a nuclear power plant in Ipo and shares his life only at weekends.
Go Kyung-pyoas Soo-wan
Hae-jun's younger partner, who never accepts the suicide ruling.
Park Yong-wooas Im Ho-shin
Seo-rae's second husband, an investor found dead in his pool the day after Hae-jun meets them.
Why it matters
Decision to Leave is a murder investigation that becomes a love story without ever stopping being an investigation. Park Chan-wook, the director of Oldboy, made a film in which the violence happens almost entirely off screen and the danger lies in looking: a man whose job is to observe a woman cannot tell where surveillance ends and desire begins, and the film will not tell him. It won him Best Director at Cannes in 2022. It is also a study in how a love can live almost entirely in language, between a woman speaking her second language and a man who hears in it what he needs to hear, so that the most important declaration in the film is one its speaker never knew he made.