Film screening of Decision to Leave (2023)

As part of our collaboration with Landmark, and a logical continuation of us opening this spring season with Oldboy (2003), Decision to Leave is the only appropriate continuation of this Park Chan-wook season, meant to celebrate his upcoming title No Other Choice (2025), set to hit theatres in Norway later this year.

The premise is seemingly quite simple, a cat and mouse play between a detective (Park Hae-il) and his femme fatale murder suspect (Tang Wei) where it’s not always clear who is who, before the story takes a sharp turn. The visual language becomes central in this film, where most things are left unsaid between the main characters. The film is built on layers and mirrors, with all the insert-shots that read like memories of someone replaying the same scene in their head hundreds of times, like a detail-obsessed murderer, like a detective unable to let go of his obsession. Park Chan-wook doesn’t make the same mistakes he made with Oldboy (2003) at the start of his career. In Decision to Leave, the female character is not there only to help the protagonist advance his own plot. Instead, Tang Wei’s character uses the protagonist to assist her own grim story.