The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsSouth Korean auteur behind 'Oldboy' returns with 'pure' love story
Filmmaker Park Chan-wook, known for his ultra-violent thrillers that helped catapult South Korean cinema onto the global stage, is back with a different work -- a love story.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
In this file picture taken on May 28, 2022, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook delivers a speech on stage after he won the Best Director prize for the film 'Decision to Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)' during the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. (AFP/Valery Hache)
F
ilmmaker Park Chan-wook, known for his ultra-violent thrillers that helped catapult South Korean cinema onto the global stage, is back with an altogether different work -- a restrained yet deeply emotional love story.
Decision to Leave arrives after the world-smashing success of South Korean entertainment, including Bong Joon-ho's Parasite and Netflix's Squid Game, and has been the top-grossing domestic film in South Korea since opening last week.
It stars Chinese star Tang Wei and Korean actor Park Hae-il, who plays a detective investigating a man's fatal plunge from a mountain. He falls for the victim's mysterious wife, whom he suspects of being behind her husband's death.
The film has already won Park the Best Director prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which had previously awarded him the Grand Prix for his 2003 cult-classic revenge thriller Oldboy.
However, unlike many of his previous works, Decision to Leave contains almost no adult or graphically violent scenes.
IndieWire has called it "the most romantic movie of the year (so far)", while early reviews praised it as a gorgeously rendered love story marked by elegance and restraint.
"I agree that it's a romantic film, and I wanted to make such a movie," Park said in an interview with reporters in Seoul last month.
More from The Weekender
Farewell, good breast
A cancer diagnosis brings more than the fear of illness. It raises difficult questions about how to protect those we love while revealing unexpected reserves of tenderness and resilience.
Siapa Anda? Mengapa Anda?
What begins as a small grammatical curiosity becomes a larger question about language, culture and the way we understand ourselves in relation to others - and, ultimately, about what we risk losing in a world increasingly impatient with reflection, ambiguity and the humanities.
A passport to the kingdom of the sick
A breast cancer diagnosis, a journey to the kingdom of the sick and a determination to describe what lies there without metaphor, euphemism or the word “fight.”
