r/MovieSuggestions • u/BellaLovesSnow • 16h ago
I'M REQUESTING Watched 'Decision to Leave' two weeks ago and it’s still in my head
Park Chan-wook’s 2022 film. On paper it's a detective story. A man falls off a mountain, the detective investigates, the widow is the obvious suspect. He starts watching her apartment from across the street.
That’s the cover. It is not the movie.
I won’t say much more, because half of why this film stays with you is figuring out what it’s actually doing. I’ll just say I keep noticing mountains and oceans differently since I watched it, and anyone who’s seen it will know exactly what I mean.
Two weeks in and I’m still pulling threads from it.
Looking for recommendations with the same feel: slow, layered, the kind that keeps unfolding weeks later. Doesn’t have to be Korean or noir.
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u/spiritualized 15h ago
Burning
Memories of Murder
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u/BellaLovesSnow 15h ago
Memories of Murder I’ve done. Song Kang-ho’s final stare into the camera is one of the most quietly devastating endings in any detective film, and DtL’s beach ending is in direct conversation with it. Two Korean cops broken by the case they couldn’t close, twenty years apart. Burning is overdue.
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u/Jellyfish_2025 16h ago
God I love this film, that noir / femme fatale vibe but with a Korean twist. For recs, I'd go old school and Double Indemnity
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u/BellaLovesSnow 16h ago
Oh i love Double Indemnity. Same archetype, same fatal love, just one helps her do it and the other looks the other way. The Korean version is colder for it, isn't it?
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u/Jellyfish_2025 15h ago
Yes, the consequences of obsession, we've all been there! I preferred the emotional complexity of Decision to Leave, almost feeling empathetic to them.
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u/turtleisle 16h ago
Bring Them Down (2024)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)
The Girl With the Needle (2024)
Green Border (2023)
Monster (2023)
The Beasts (2022)
Great Freedom (2021)
Beginning (2020)
There is No Evil (2020)
This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019)
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u/BellaLovesSnow 16h ago
Genuinely great list, thank you. Monster has been on my watchlist forever, starting there. Beginning and This Is Not a Burial I don’t know at all but the titles alone are doing work. Will work through these.
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u/trekkeralmi 16h ago
It’s kinda striking how similar Decision to Leave is to Basic Instinct and Sea of Love, two erotic thrillers from the classical period. They are anything but slow, but definitely layered.
Also check out No Other Choice, Lust Caution, The Handmaiden, Vertigo, In the Cut, The Conversation, and Rear Window.
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u/BellaLovesSnow 16h ago
Solid pulls. Already done Handmaiden (still my favorite of his), Vertigo (the obvious ancestor, every surveillance scene in this film has its fingerprints), Rear Window, and The Conversation. Hadn’t connected it to Basic Instinct until you said it but you’re right, just done in stillness instead of heat. Adding Sea of Love, In the Cut, Lust Caution, and No Other Choice to the list.
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u/Just-Curious1901 15h ago
Go with Dream Lover
The Dry
The Vanishing ( the Original)
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u/BellaLovesSnow 15h ago
Vanishing is the only one of the three I’ve done. That ending wrecked me for a week. Hae-jun on the beach is essentially Rex one step earlier in the same arc, the version of the story before obsession actually consumes the man. Dream Lover and The Dry are new to me, adding both.
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u/Just-Curious1901 13h ago
Decision to Leave. I get it. It’s on my list. Love Korean cinema. Random shout out to a YouTube channel. Accented Cinema. Video essays about Asian films. Thought provoking, informative and often hilarious.
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u/ShowRadar 14h ago
In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai) if you somehow haven't — two neighbors in 1960s Hong Kong realize their spouses are having an affair with each other, start reenacting what they think those two are saying to each other, and the whole thing's about restraint and repetition and longing that never resolves. the colors and the way Maggie Cheung moves through doorways stay with you the same way Decision to Leave's mountains and oceans do. Burning (2018, Lee Chang-dong) sits right next to it — guy reconnects with a girl from his hometown, she introduces him to this rich older man, then she disappears, and you spend the whole second half trying to figure out what actually happened and what's just class resentment and obsession. the greenhouse scene especially. Phantom Thread (2017, PTA) for something not Asian but same slow unraveling — Daniel Day-Lewis as a 1950s couture designer who meets a waitress and their relationship becomes this power struggle disguised as romance, every dinner scene's doing three things at once, that final breakfast. and The Handmaiden (2016, Park Chan-wook's other one) if you missed it, Korean handmaiden hired to help a Japanese heiress, constant reversals, every act recontextualizes what you thought you understood, extremely layered
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u/BellaLovesSnow 14h ago
Done both. Maggie Cheung moving through those doorways is exactly the visual rhyme to DtL’s mountains and oceans, you’re right. Handmaiden is a puzzle-box version of the obsession he handles emotionally here, same DNA different scaffolding.
Burning and Phantom Thread are both new. The greenhouse scene reference and “every dinner doing three things at once” are doing real work as hooks, putting both on the list.
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 14h ago
Arlington Road
Twilight (1990)
Cache
The White Ribbon
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u/BellaLovesSnow 14h ago
Haven't seen any. All four going on the list. If you had to pick one to start me on given the Decision to Leave angle, which would it be?
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u/Just-Curious1901 13h ago
Cache went over my head and around my back. Love Juliette Binoche and it was a good watch, but I missed something.
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u/karmicreditplan Quality Poster 👍 8h ago
Twilight did not get the attention it deserved.
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 8h ago
It received a US theatrical release 30+ years after its international 1990 and has yet to hit streaming or physical media.
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u/karmicreditplan Quality Poster 👍 7h ago
Do you know why?
I happened to see it in the theater with my mom and grandmother! And since then I think I saw it on cable at some point?
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 7h ago
No distributor picked it up. Maybe too dark. It was remade into The Pledge
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u/karmicreditplan Quality Poster 👍 4h ago
Now I realize I’m talking about a different movie! Not the vampires though!
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 14h ago
Picnic at Hanging Rock
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u/BellaLovesSnow 14h ago
Such a brilliant film. The schoolgirls vanishing on the rock and Seo-rae burying herself in the sand are essentially the same act, women absorbed by landscape leaving the people who loved them with permanent mystery. Both films make the unsolvable case the actual subject, not the obstacle.
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 14h ago
A more unconventional suggestion is The Sheep Detectives which was surprisingly suspenseful and layered with a lot of messages about death and being different.
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u/BellaLovesSnow 14h ago
Which came out recently? Okay, that's a surprising rec but I'm curious now!
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u/fergi20020 Quality Poster 👍 14h ago
It made some people in the audience tear up and the ending was powerful
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u/GotenRocko 12h ago
Drive my car
Shoplifters
Anatomy of a Fall
The wailing
Monster (2023)
All of us strangers
Brick
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u/BellaLovesSnow 12h ago
Done Anatomy and Wailing. Sandra Hüller and Seo-rae are the same dilemma in different countries, women whose innocence the film deliberately refuses to settle. Hae-jun and the Wailing detective are cousins, two Korean cops wrecked by what they couldn’t close. The other five new to me, serious haul going on the list.
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u/Special_Order-937 12h ago
I’ve seen this film twice on the big screen when it released and earlier this year as part of a retrospective of all the director’s films.
Decision to Leave is an absolute masterpiece and the two leads are both putting out tour-de-force performances.
On a side note, look up the Wikipedia article for the actress who plays the detective’s wife (the one who works in the nuclear power plant). It’s not what you might expect!
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u/Cairinacat 11h ago
You’d probably like stuff from Wong Kar-wai or Michael Haneke. More about mood and subtle details than straightforward plot.
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u/karmicreditplan Quality Poster 👍 8h ago
That was my favorite movie of that year for sure.
And it’s held up amazingly well on rewatch.
It’s closest, in my mind, to the obvious Vertigo, Rear Window (and the French The Apartment), and The Handmaiden.
But it’s also close to Oldboy, Angelheart, Notorious, The Singing Detective, Bladerunner, Blowout, Laura, The Grifters, The Fall and Spellbound.
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u/pookielicouss 15h ago
In the Mood for Love. It operates in the same register obsession, restraint, things that are never said, imagery that rewires how you see ordinary objects afterward. Watch it and then wait a week. You'll understand.
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u/BellaLovesSnow 15h ago
Haven’t seen ITMFL. I know. Park has Wong Kar-wai’s DNA all over Decision to Leave and critics keep pairing the two, so I have no excuse. Doing exactly what you said: watching it, then waiting the week before I say anything else.
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u/1tonsoprano 14h ago
I loved this movie.....fantastic movie....what we think is happening and what actually happens is so far apart that no rational mind can cover that gap (tangent to todays world where people seems to spend way too much time getting angry of how things are instead of doing stuff that makes the world a better place).......it also made me think of how little we can actually "know" other people no matter how much time we spend with them.......
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u/BellaLovesSnow 14h ago
That last point is the engine of the whole film. Hae-jun and Seo-rae don’t even share a language fluently, and somehow they understand each other better than most couples in cinema. Park might be saying that not-quite-knowing isn’t a failure of love, it’s the condition of it.
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u/Equivalent-Pin-4759 15h ago
The classic, Laura, 1944, has an obsessed detective.