Decision to Leave brings back dark obsessions for Oldboy director Park Chan-wook

polygon.com:

Back around 2006, if you asked a cinephile what Park Chan-wook’s deal was as a filmmaker, the answer would have been nice and simple: “He’s the Korean revenge-movie guy.” Park’s “vengeance trilogy” — the unrelated but simpatico dark thrillers Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance — crossed international borders during an era where it was rarer to see America fielding breakout hits from other countries than it is today. Twisty plotting, intense violence, and stunning action sequences like Oldboy’s famous “hammer and a hallway” fight helped put Park’s name on the map, but these three films (not his first, but at the time his most famous) also pigeonholed him as a director with very specific interests and tastes.

Park has become harder to pin down since then. His 2009 horror movie Thirst is a bleak vampire love story with more than a touch of sly comedy. Park’s English-language debut Stoker is an oddball misfire that pits Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman against each other in a kind of lush drawing-room psychodrama balanced between horror story and period piece. Park got into spy action with The Little Drummer Girl, rom-coms with I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, and literary historical crime drama with The Handmaiden. And his latest, the immaculately crafted Decision to Leave, is both a police procedural and a love story, the kind of film that drifts lightly from one genre to another, and doesn’t fully land until the final devastating moments.

Decision to Leave does clarify a specific agenda for Park’s highly divergent filmography: He’s a man obsessed with obsession. Over and over, his protagonists get a compulsive idea into their heads, then doggedly chase it, no matter what it costs them. And