A packet of wet wipes. A carry-on sized bottle of hand lotion. A tube of indeterminate lip balm. A chainmail glove. These sundries sound like preventive measures for covid not crime, but in “Decision to Leave,” a new movie by Park Chan-Wook, one of South Korea’s preeminent directors, they become ameliorative studies of unrequited love and absented masculinity. It’s too bad, then, in our era of revanchist masculinity, of #MeToo, now stricken and wan, that what suffices for satire is something less like solidarity with anti-patriarchal sentiments than a handwringing #NotMeToo. 

The film opens on a shooting range, but guns figure little into the narrative. Early on, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), our protagonist, a Busan detective, remarks to his younger, chain-smoking partner, “Why carry a gun, if you’re too out of shape to run?” Seen from this side of the Atlantic, it’s a stunning riposte to a recent rise in gun violence.  

Homicide detectives need murder, and it’s dished up in short order. Hae-joon and his partner are called to the bottom of a needle-nose butte, out in the boonies, where the body of a man clad in climbing gear is shattered like the Rolex on his wrist. His wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), is called into the station. “I worry when he does not come back from a mountain, thinking he might die at last,” she says, to Hae-joon’s astonishment. We’ll be wondering what that “at last” means for the entire movie’s bloated two hour and 18-minute run time. 

During the week, Hae-joon obsesses over Seo-rae, watching her at work as a caregiver to the old, or at night, as she smokes on her couch at home, falling asleep with the effort, something the insomniac detective cannot do. On the weekends, he lives with his wife in a small town, where she lectures him on the cognitive benefits of weekly sex, an attempted engineering of passion as hilarious as it is a candid reminder that love requires work. The implication is clear: something is missing in their relationship. Or is something missing in Hae-joon? 

“Decision to Leave” is clearly about things: justice, male violence and sexuality, gender hierarchies and infidelity. The movie is metaphor-mad, so obsessed with meaning making that to miss one is to miss a plot point. Park’s dollhouse precision evokes Wes Anderson’s surrealism by numbers, which drains the hope out of Jean Luc-Goddard’s quip that “cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” Every shot, meticulously crafted and cleverly captured – at one point we see through the eye of a dead fish – drains the life out of itself by mumbling that “this means something!” 

In form, erotic thrillers, which haven’t been good since “Basic Instinct,” are simple. The obvious badness of the crime (typically murder) is problematized by the ambiguity of the sexual attraction it generates. Park upends this formula with vigilante justice. Seo-rae, we come to learn, was abused by her husband, which is clear motive for murder but not evidence of it. If her husband was abusive and if, as a consequence, she killed him, the question is less about the morality of the extrajudicial killing than it is about the marginalizing structures that obscured, hid or shielded domestic abuse.  

By design, Hae-joon is the obverse of her former husband, gentle, perspicacious, abstemious, and a talented cook, all the familiar trappings of the archetypal good wife. He is meant to be a salve for the sins of men, but the film, which centers on his perspective, instead appears to shake its head at the loss of some nominally essential virility. That’s because the film sees Seo-rae, rather than the other way round. 

Part of the problem is not Park’s. His early works, nicknamed the Vengeance Trilogy, directed during the early aughts, were flashpoints in a burgeoning conversation about toxic masculinity shaped by the war on terror, about quotidian men driven, for various reasons, to ultraviolence. Now, strongmen, and a handful of -women, are ascendant; democracy is on the decline. Park’s famous, baptismal bloodlettings are too on the nose. 

Halfway through the film, Hae-joon is “completely shattered” and transfers to the police force in the town where he resides with his wife. But another body surfaces. And so does Seo-rae. By the end of the film, awash in confusion, screaming out on a rocky, windswept beach as nightfall approaches, Hae-joon searches for Seo-rae, trying finally to see her. If he does – well, that’s up to the viewer to decide.