The best mystery movie of the 2020s was met with positive reviews and a long list of accolades, but it still hasn’t reached the kind of audience it deserves. A film’s quality isn’t the only metric that decides how many people will see it. Budget, marketing, and the presence of big stars can also have a huge impact.
The mystery genre has been changing a lot in recent years, as filmmakers continue to innovate on popular formulas while providing something new. A lot of thebest mystery moviesare the ones which seem familiar at first, but have the capacity to flummox audiences.
Decision To Leave Deserves A Bigger Audience
Park Chan-wook’s Murder Mystery Is Moody And Intense
Decision to Leavemade $22.6 million at the box office, meaning that it was only a moderate success. This is a real shame, because it’s one ofPark Chan-wook’s best movies, and it shows why the director has been recognized as one of Korea’s most influential and innovative filmmakers.
Decision to Leavebenefits from two outstanding central performances. Park Hae-il plays a detective struggling with insomnia, while Chinese actor Tang Wei plays the woman who slowly consumes his every thought, even though she starts off as a suspect in one of his murder cases.
Park and Tang are vital to the film’s fascinating two-pronged character study. Park Chan-wook always leaves a shroud of ambiguity around the real motivations and feelings of his two characters, meaning that his murder mystery is much more layered and thematically resonant than the average whodunit.
Decision To Leave’s Narrative Flips The Mystery Genre On Its Head
Park Chan-wook Plays With The Form
Decision to Leavestarts out as a fairly traditional murder mystery. A man is found dead after falling from the top of a peak, and the detectives focus on his wife when they are puzzled by a total lack of suspects. However, this set-up shoots into continually surprising avenues, as the investigation morphs and takes on new layers of meaning.
Park shifts focus to the fallout, and the chasm between true justice and the rigidity of detective work.
WhileDecision to Leavemight seem like a game of cat-and-mouse at first,it soon reveals itself to be an intricately detailed romantic drama, laced with dark humor to emphasize the absurdity and danger of the situation. By revealing the solution to this murder fairly early on, Park shifts focus to the fallout, and the chasm between true justice and the rigidity of detective work.
Decision to Leave’s ending delivers one last moment of brilliance that helps cement its status as the best mystery movie of the 2020s so far. The scene on the beach is so beautifully framed and so loaded with various different meanings that it leaves a lasting impression. Unfortunately,Decision to Leavehasn’t gotten the international attention it deserves.
