Decision to Leave’s director explains its ‘sacred’ ending and crucial details

Park Chan-wook’s twisty crime drama Decision to Leave is one of the best movies of 2022, and one of the most sophisticated films he’s ever made. It manages to stand out in a career that’s already produced a number of fantastic, memorable movies, from the political drama Joint Security AreaThe revenge thriller Oldboy The amazing period piece The Handmaiden.

But Take the decision to leave It is also an extremely subtle film. English audiences may not be able to pick up certain details. Speaking with Park through a translator after his film played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, it immediately became clear he’d packed a lot of layered symbolism into the tiny details of the movie, the kinds of things that are hard to pick up, especially on a first viewing — and for non-Korean speakers, maybe impossible to catch at all. Park spoke with Polygon about the little details that shaped his story and what they meant.

Take the decision to leave, married insomniac detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il, from Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder) investigates Chinese expat Seo-rae (Tang Wei, from You can’t have too much of both passion and cautionAfter her husband’s death in what appears to be a hike accident, she leaves behind her daughter. Hae-jun is a cautious, methodical, melancholy man who obsesses endlessly over his cold cases, and he can’t sleep at night because he thinks too much about all the mysteries he’s never solved.

Seo-rae is a calm woman who can see right through Hae-jun and picks up the dynamics immediately. Hae-jun’s relationship with his wife seems solid and amiable enough, but he quickly starts to fall for Seo-rae. For her part, she doesn’t initially seem like she’s looking to replace her husband, and it isn’t clear until the end of the movie whether she’s manipulating Hae-jun so he’ll clear her of any possible crime or she’s falling for him as well. Park provided some insight into that end and some other mysteries throughout the movie.

The genres, the sex, or the violence

Photo by MUBI

One thing that’s surprised some viewers about Take the decision to leaveThis is the extent to which this crime story emphasizes romance. There’s been some debate over exactly what genre label Take the decision to leave falls under — whether it’s more a police procedural, a thriller, a murder mystery, or just a romantic drama with some murder in it.

For Park, though, there isn’t much debate. “This is one of the reasons I reduced the elements of nudity and violence in this film,” he tells Polygon. “In my opinion, most of my prior works have also been romance films, films about love. But people haven’t been able to take it in that way. I think because the nudity and violence was so explicit, so in their face, that that’s all they remember when they walk out of the theater.

“So even when I do make a romance film, people will look at the eroticism rather than the romanticism that was supposed to be conveyed. I wanted to break away from those misjudgments, which is why I tried to get rid of those elements in this film.”

Language barrier

Photo by MUBI

Seo-rae’s biggest characteristic may be difficult to grasp for non-Koreans speakers. She often apologizes to anyone she meets about her lack of proficiency in the language. She will sometimes speak Chinese through her smartphone and have it translate for her. The English subtitles make her appear formal and intelligent, without any hint that she is clumsy. Park says that’s a detail that likely doesn’t land well in translation.

“Seo-rae’s Korean pronunciation is imperfect, but it’s just good enough that a Korean person would be able to understand what she’s saying,” Park says. “When she’s sending a text, she has the most perfect grammar and spelling. However, her husband is terrible at grammar and spelling. When she’s speaking, all her phrases are almost perfect. Because she learnt Korean from period dramas, her accent is even better than that of a modern Korean speaker. She’s like a person trying to learn English through Shakespeare’s writing.”

Park says Korean speakers will likely think Seo-rae sounds “a bit funny,” but that he wanted them to experience a specific process of getting used to her language: “You might be surprised by how it sounds. You will find that the Korean she speaks is much more precise than what it seems, and it’s also more refined. A viewer may feel a little embarrassed or awkward about thinking her speech was humorous earlier.

“There are also instances in the movie where she will use a particular word, but in a strange context. So when someone hears it, they would think it’s wrong at first. The more they hear it, the more they can realize there’s actually a new meaning to that word. All this might be difficult to get through the subtitles, but I’m sure all of you have also had a similar experience with listening to a foreigner trying to speak English, and it doesn’t quite sound correct.”

Take the decision to leaveThis movie has been hugely successful in Korea. It landed at the top in Korea when it was first released in 2022 and ranked among the top 10 Korean box-office successes. Park states that Seo-rae’s screenplay was also a bestseller. This has allowed more people to see how she speaks and writes. “Her classical use of Korean has actually become a new trend,” he says.

The pockets

Photo by MUBI

Hae-jun’s specifically tailored clothing is a peculiar running detail in the film: He’s had his clothes tailored with extra pockets, which he fills with small objects: tissues, packets of antibiotic wipes, and so forth. Seo-rae’s wife, and her husband, casually reach in those pockets to get something they need. It is almost as if the pocket were a machine that can be used for vending machines. It seems clear Park and co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong want us to see he’s a meticulous planner who tries to prepare for everything — and the women in his life take advantage of his preparation, a process he accepts passively.

“You’re correct that his pockets are there to express that he’s ready for anything in his life,” Park says. “Because he’s a detective, you might expect that he’d carry a gun within one of these pockets. But the funny thing is that he doesn’t really have a gun. He also carries lip balm and wipes. I wanted to express that he’s a generous person who understands everyone around him. He is able to understand the reasons for why people do this and that. He’s ready to embrace anything in anyone in his life.”

Park says detectives encounter more “abnormal people in society” than the average citizen, so they need “a wider sense of understanding” of humanity. “You need to be a more embracing person to have that occupation,” he says. “So I wanted to express that he has the right attitude to be a policeman. A policeman must not be prejudiced against other people. A policeman may wrongly assume someone is a suspect if they do so based on looks or similar things. So that is something I considered very important to have in this character.”

However, there is more. Park said viewers need to pay attention to the way his wife spends her pockets and not how Seo-rae uses them.

“It’s true all the women in his life are taking things out of his pockets, but there’s an important difference between the two women taking things: His wife, despite the fact that she spent a long time with her husband, she doesn’t know what is in which pocket in his jacket. While Seo-rae knows exactly what to get from which pocket.”

The chainmail glove

Image: MUBI

At one point in the film, Hae-jun faces a runaway criminal who’s wielding a knife, and the detective carefully pulls out and dons a single chainmail glove, which he uses to defend himself. It’s an odd piece of equipment for a policeman, and non-Korean viewers may wonder: Is a chainmail glove standard police equipment in Korea?

“Not all Korean policeman wear those gloves,” Park says. “But the actor, Park Hae-il, actually has an acquaintance who is a retired policeman, and he advised him that he should keep a glove like that, in case a robber comes into his house or anything dangerous happens. So that’s where that’s from.”

Park says it’s another small character touch meant to emphasize Hae-jun’s pockets and their contents: “Again, it’s to reinforce the image that he’s ready for any situation.”

Eyes and eyedrops

Image: MUBI

Viewers might notice an obsession with the eyes close-up, and people staring at one another throughout. Decision To Leave — a major running theme is the question of who accurately sees what, and who misses what’s in front of their eyes. Hae-jun underlines the themes by repeatedly producing a bottle of eyedrops from his endless pockets, and applying it whenever he’s about to examine a crime scene or an evidence folder. It feels like his eyes are being cleared. But it could just as easily be a sign that he feels strain or drain when he’s dealing with all these crimes, or that his longstanding insomnia leaves him with dry eyes. What is the cause?

“I just want to reinforce the point that these aren’t eyedrops because he has an illness,” Park says. “It’s just for when he has foggy vision, so he can see the world more clearly.”

That’s also in keeping with Take the decision to leave’s themes about mystery and perspective, and about the difficulty of seeing and understanding other people — even for people as insightful and penetrating as Hae-jun and Seo-rae.

“Throughout the movie, we see a lot of mist,” Park says. “We also notice that people’s clothes are on the borderline between green and blue. There’s a lot of uncertainty visually, which is a theme throughout the movie. It represents how the characters don’t know their own emotions. They’re also unclear about other people’s emotions. They aren’t sure whether Seo-rae is supposed to be a femme fatale who is trying to take advantage of people.”

The song ‘Mist’

Korean viewers are likely to have a lot more feelings associated with the song “Mist,” which recurs several times throughout the movie, including over its end titles. Park claims that every person in his society has heard this song at one time or another. The 1967 version was originally recorded by Jung Hoon Hee. In a Q&A after a Take the decision to leavePark revealed that he was also looking for the best male version of the song to use in his film. Song Chang Sik, a well-known singer and songwriter was his choice.

But while he originally meant to end the movie with Song’s version over the credits, he decided that didn’t work within the themes he wanted to draw out of the film. “I realized it broke the balance,” he says. “If you end the movie just hearing the male voice, it makes the movie seem like just a sad story of one man who met and lost a woman. I tried hard to keep the balance between them throughout the movie.”

Instead, he asked Song and Jung to return to the studio and record a new duet version of the song, which then became the movie’s official original song release.

English speakers will have a hard time finding an accurate translation of “Mist” online. Park says streaming service Mubi translated the lyrics for the film’s subtitles, and those subtitles “are the most correct English translations available.”

“The story [of Decision to Leave] started from the song ‘Mist,’ Park says. “Specifically within those lyrics, there are the words ‘Open your eyes within the mist.’ So I really focused on those lyrics. I wanted to make a character who is trying really hard to see through the foggy, unclear world.”

That idea returns to Hae-jun and his eyedrops, and his attempts to pierce that fog, but it also underlines the movie’s romantic themes, where Hae-jun and Seo-rae are both clumsily fumbling through their misunderstandings of each other. “It’s about loneliness, about trying to find someone to be with,” Park says. “It’s about trying to find someone to love, despite all the loneliness in your life.”

What is the end of? Take the decision to leave mean?

Image: MUBI

[Ed. note: End spoilers for Decision to Leave ahead.]

It’s a surprise at the end: Seo-rae decides to drown or suffocate under the sand in order to bury her body in the sand along a rugged coast. She leaves behind a message for Hae-jun that will hint at her “decision to leave,” but not fully explain her plan. The movie ends with him chasing her clues, finding her car, and arriving too late to the scene of her suicide, where he finds no evidence about what she did, or even whether she’s dead.

Astute viewers will realize that in part, Seo-rae kills herself because she fell in love with Hae-jun at the moment where he fell out of love with her — she says as much in her message — but she understands they can never be together, because she’s a murderer. At the same time, she accurately uncovered his obsession with cold cases, and she’s leaving him with a mystery he’ll never be able to unravel — exactly how she died, and what happened to her body. By choosing a form of death that will keep him endlessly guessing, she’s guaranteeing he’ll always remember and obsess over her, the way she obsessed over him.

Park has often said what links his movies in his mind is the theme of responsibility — the way his characters do or don’t take responsibility for their own actions. In this case, Seo-rae’s way of accepting the consequences of her murders is a way of atoning that may leave viewers melancholy or angry, but Park feels it’s a significant choice for her to make either way.

Partly, this is due to the differences between taking responsibility for your actions and accepting responsibility. “It comes from a deep sense of ethical perspective when someone says, ‘You need to feel a sense of responsibility for something,’” he says. “But it is a completely different topic to take action for what you feel responsibility about. This is something completely different and challenging. Just think. Feeling that sense of responsibility versus taking action for something you feel responsibility about — I want to emphasize that taking action is a kind of sacred act.”

“So for instance, if someone had committed a big sin and they cannot find a way for reparation, and they ended up committing suicide — we cannot call this action good, per se. We can still understand their feelings and emotions, and we even have the ability to respect them if they feel this is the best option.

“So the characters in my films, whenever they’re taking responsibility for their actions, it’s not always successful, and it’s not always commendable. You might even say it’s stupid. But I do want to say that this commitment to action itself can be considered sacred.”

Take the decision to leave It is now in theatres