Fleapit revisited:Decision To Leave.

When Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) and his partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-pyo) are sent to investigate the case of a retired immigration officer, Ki  Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok) found dead at the bottom of a mountain near Busan it looks, initially, like a terrible, unfortunate, accident.

But is it? In dealing with the case, Hae-jun, particularly, is in danger of biting off more than he can chew. Park Chan-wook's 2022 film Decision To Leave (shown last night on BBC4, and still available to watch in iPlayer) follows Hae-jun as he falls deeper into a mystery that starts to look more and more impenetrable the more we learn about it.

Ki Do-soo was a man who liked to mark his territory. He had his initials monogrammed on to all his belongings:- his phone, his wallet, and even his wife! Said wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) - a Chinese emigrant much younger than Do-soo, immediately falls under suspicion.

For fairly obvious reasons. Not least a lack of shock, or even upset, about his death, because her DNA was found underneath the fingernails of his corpse, and because photographic evidence seems to prove he used to beat her. Yet Seo-rae's alibi stacks up. She was with one of the 'grannies' she cares for in her job visiting elderly, infirm, and housebound people.

It's a job she's very good at, the grannies love her and soon, it seems, Hae-jun starts to fall in love with her too. At the very least, he becomes obsessed and infatuated with her. He stakes her apartment out nightly, and he pictures Seo-rae when he's making love with, or to, his wife Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun). Jung-an works away and her and Hae-jun only see each other at weekends. Though both of them are in denial that this has any affect on their marriage.

As Hae-jun gets to know Seo-rae we do too. Her background opens up. Her father was an independence fighter for the Korean Liberation Army, fighting the Japanese in Manchuria, and was known, for good reason, as 'The Leopard Man of Manchuria', her mother died in suspicious circumstances, and Seo-rae talks on her phone to a man who demands Hae-jun's head. 

He doesn't specify if it needs to be served on a plate. She seems like the prime suspect for Do-soo's murder but are Hae-jun's feelings for her clouding his view? Plus, Do-soo was, before his death, being accused of seriously corrupt business dealings so suicide can't be taken off the table.

To find out what really happened we're dragged into a world of mystery and double crossing. A mobile phone is tossed into the sea Rebekah Vardy style, Mahler's fifth symphony plays out, a Rolex is stopped at a very specific time, and a step count on a mobile phone starts to look suspiciously high. There's even an unusual and, possibly - probably, very unprofessional date at a Buddhist temple where Hae-jun and Seo-rae get to know each other a little better. 

Or at least they think they do. They certainly have some similarities. Seo-rae likes to quote Confucius and Hae-jun is also prone to poetic flights of fancy. As well as being an insomniac (even though that doesn't stop him nearly falling asleep at the wheel and crashing his car) and an idealist. He finds some of the younger, more tempestuous, methods of his sidekick Soo-wan a bit too vicious and reprimands him accordingly. Though Soo-wan also, understandably, disproves of some of Hae-jan's antics.

To confuse things further there's San-oh (Park Jeong-min) - a lothario, a potential murderer, and a man with a lot of history whom Hae-jan is chasing for another case, there's Sa Cheol-seong, also known as Slappy (Seo Hyun-wood), who we see earning his nickname in a brutal scene with Seo-rae, and there's business investor Im Ho-shin (Park Yong-woo) who appears to have got himself caught up in something much bigger than he'd planned.

Decision To Leave touches on theme of depression, menopause, and high blood pressure and much of the film takes place in either the dark or, in the case of the date at the temple, in the pouring rain giving it even more of a noirish quality than it already had. There's the odd vertigo incuding scene, a few eeries ones too, and Jo Yeong-wook's score fits like a glove:- sometimes jarring (in a good way), sometimes moving, you only really notice it when you're supposed to and that's for the best.

Qualifying it for the art house market, there are lots of recurring symbols and some of these, you suspect, are supposed to signify something though I was never sure what. Cigarettes, dead crows, ice cream, mist, fish being gutted, cracked knuckles, mobile phones, and sushi all seem to appear very regularly as does the use of the word 'solitary'.

If these are keys to unlocking the story you'll need to be a better detective than me (or, indeed, Hae-jan) to do that. When the dust of Ki Do-soo's case finally settles down, and Hae-jan has moved town to live permanently with his wife, he is called to investigate a second murder case (this time with new partner Yeon-su (Kim Shin-young)) and, once again, Seo-rae is involved.

The echoes of the first case don't end there and it becomes very addictive waiting to find out just what has happened (be warned though, there are more than a few red herrings along the way). Decision To Leave is a very stylish film (there's substance too but you get the impression that if Chan-wook had to choose between the two he'd take style every time) but it also contains a classic neo-noir storyline. Although one that, for me, owed a slight debt to nineties 'erotic thrillers' like Basic Instinct and Body Of Evidence (though with much less nudity). Don't hold that against it. Take a night train to Busan and immerse yourself in Park Chan-wook's fevered imagination.