DECISION TO LEAVE

Korean master Park Chan-wook, notorious for the extremes of violence and sex in films such as Old Boy and The Handmaiden, shows rigorous restraint here with no loss of intensity in a tale of love, murder and deception. A conscientious homicide detective (Park Hae-il), hitherto happily married, investigates an experienced climber’s unlikely fall from the top of a monolith. The chief potential suspect is the man’s beautiful, much younger Chinese wife (Tang Wei), a former illegal immigrant who is now a much-beloved care worker with the elderly. Soon the detective is also falling in love while interrogating her, a tragic dereliction of duty for which his young suspect will come to feel an even more destructive guilt. Director Park’s story picks its way through a labyrinth of lies, confessions and clues scraped from cell phones, a key modern element in a plot that otherwise could have been concocted by Alfred Hitchcock.