Whenever there’s a chance to whiplash-pan or track or glide within an image, especially if such a move helps disorient a viewer or direct their attention to a telling detail, the movie will not let those opportunities go to waste.Īnd then Hae-jun meets Seo-rae in the precinct’s interrogation room, and the camera simply holds still on this instantly smitten cop’s face for what feels like eternity and a day. Ditto a shot of a text message, which then drops viewers inside the phone for a reverse angle. When ants begin to crawl across a corpse’s eyeball, we switch to the dead man’s P.O.V., complete with insects scurrying across the frame. Split screens and mirror images are abound. There’s a foot chase that feels lifted from an RPG videogame. So it’s not surprising that his latest gift to filmgoers, Decision to Leave, is brimming with the sort of flourishes and big-swing aesthetics that director Park excels in. But he’s completely incapable of making a boring one. Some of his movies are better than others. Even his 2018 take on The Little Drummer Girl turns a miniseries adaptation of a John Le Carre novel into an espionage hall of mirrors, with set pieces designed to match the story’s shifting perspectives and performative spycraft. His motto seems to be that if it’s baroque, don’t fix it from his “Vengeance Trilogy” onward, he’s given us dizzying, punch-drunk examples of genre movies and melodramas dosed with liberal amounts of sex, violence and swooping, swirling camera shots. If you know the work of Park Chan-wook - key member of the Korean New Wave, cinematic agent provocateur, architect of the greatest hammer fight sequence ever - then you know this is a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of high style.
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