Decision to Leave

Park Chan-wook turned his own signature down on purpose. He has said violence and nudity had come to sit in front of everything in his films, too strong and too graphic, and that he had to subdue both so the love story underneath could be seen; he wanted teenagers, and adults who had refused his work as too gory, to walk in. So the feeling moves into objects. Phone records, an undeleted audio file and a tracking app carry case and affair at once, and the ending turns on a man hearing his own sentence played back. Seo-rae is an emigrant from China who cares for the elderly, and the film runs between Korean and Mandarin, so the couple meet through translation. Park won best director at Cannes. At home it turned 13 Blue Dragon nominations into seven wins, among them film, director, actor, actress and screenplay. It opened on 1,374 screens at number one and passed a million admissions within a fortnight, was South Korea’s Oscar entry and reached the December shortlist without making the final five. Mubi holds it for Turkey. A good fit if you want an investigation assembled out of phone screens, recordings and one misread sentence. Not for viewers after the cruelty of Oldboy; that side is turned down deliberately.