‘Decision To Leave’ Director Park Chan-Wook Explains How Less Is Much More When It Comes To Creating Tension: “That’s The Purest Form Of Cinema”
Bong Joon-ho may be the national hero for bringing home the Oscar for Parasite, but it was Park Chan-wook who first blazed the trail for Korean cinema. After two false starts, his international career began in earnest in 2000 with Berlinale hit Joint Security Area (J.S.A), a military thriller set in the no-man’s land between North and South Korea. In the years since, Director Park has been a quicksilver talent, never repeating himself and bringing savagely original twists to genres as diverse as the vampire movie (Thirst), the erotic thriller (Handmaiden) and manga (Oldboy). His latest, Decision to Leave, is no exception, a perversely modern and yet classically Hitchcockian whodunnit, in which Park Hae-il’s obsessive detective Hae-joon falls hard for his suspect (Tang Wei).