SHADOWS and FOG

Desire is the double-edged panacea for loneliness in the cinema of Korean director Park Chan-wook. It’s seen in Song Kang-ho’s vampire preacher in 2010’s Thirst and the fanciful, battery-eating patients/lovers of 2005’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. It’s also in his new film, Decision to Leave, a measured and masterful romance cut from the same emotionally charged and desire-obsessed cloth as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo – the very film that inspired Park to pick up the camera.

Since breaking out internationally with his lauded Vengeance trilogy, Park’s distinctive brand of precisiontooled filmmaking has been marked by its bloody violence and jet black (sometimes very sick) humour. There’s also his love for puzzle-box plotlines that tell of the eternally wronged who are then driven by their own righteous code for some kind of exoneration or cryptic answer. is less explosive when contextualised by that metric, but it is no less affecting or forceful than the director’s previous works. Entrenched in coded exchanges, the film is a foggy illusion that forces the viewer to decipher its meaning. That requirement for a sharp eye is only fitting for a story about a detective, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), who is investigating – and subsequently falling for