Decision to Leave, Living and Watcher

 

I only knew director and co-writer Park Chan-wook from his superior English language feature Stoker that I have watched a couple of times. Decision to Leave is in his native South Korean language. I was not sure about all those five stars and his best director award at Cannes. Good detective falls for suspect. That's it. It's a bit like a Hitchcock psychological thriller without the suspense. There s a rock face.

Late on the dead victim's wife tells the detective "the moment you stopped being in love with me was exactly when I started loving you". There is a lot about mobile phones, (she has been tracking him ???(, with texts, pictures, video, messages and recordings. All got a bit too complicated for me. The last half hour seems like a rush, and even more complicated, after it had seemed that the previous plot had been resolved. Visually stunning, very clever and absorbing. I should really try to see it again sometime as things happen too quickly.

An Oscar worthy and career defining performance from Bill Nighy as Mr Williams lights up Living. Fantastic screenplay from Kazuo Ishiguro (I know I'm biased), is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru and well directed by Oliver Hermanus. The large cast are all fantastic as if a role like these doesn't come along very often. To name just two: Nichola McAuliffe (Mrs Blake) and Tom Burke (Sutherland) but I thought the best was Patsy Ferran as Fiona, Mr William's daughter in law, as she battles against both men's reserve.

The film captures the period so well. London in the fifties was so familiar to me, even the London County Council badge on my junior school blazer. It seemed two thirds through that the film ended all of a sudden and far too early. But the last part gives us a highly emotional explanation of everything that went before.

It's a clever poster. Who is watching who. Julia or the man in the window seen here over her right eye. He is played by a familiar Burn Gorman who Julia finds disturbing. There is a definite  reminder of Hitchcock's Rear Window and this films could have been called just that. There have been murders, but these are unconnected to Julia's increasing paranoia, as she feels isolated in Bucharest. The film is quite slow to begin with, but the last half hour is much better and the ending is terrific. At first I didn't recognise Maiko Monroe as Julia, but hen remembered her as the lead in the creepy It Follows. Her mostly absent husband is played by Karl Glusman. A psychological thriller more than the advertised horror.