Decision to Leave ⛰️🌊

Few directors can rework Hitchcock with such grace, bringing to life a story that feels original, layered, and deeply authentic.
Park Chan-wook succeeds, creating a film that blends mystery, melodrama, noir, and visual poetry.
Every frame is crafted with care — full of meaning, suspended between formal control and emotional tension.

<< “The moment you said you loved me, your love ended. And the moment your love ended, my love began.” >>

What is the “decision to leave”?
It’s the space between beginning and end — the confrontation between love and death.
Seo-rae lives in that space: to free her mother, she commits the hardest act of love — killing her.
Likewise, to escape a husband who sees her as property, she becomes a murderer.

Seo-rae knows the price of love from the very beginning.

<< “Maybe I went to Ipo to become one of your unresolved cases.” >>

The film is built in two mirrored parts: gestures and symbols return, transformed.
The sea and the mountain become twin metaphors — opposite yet intertwined:

<< “Confucius said, ‘Wise people are like water. Benevolent people are like mountains.’” >>

The mountain is vertical — a place of release and elevation, of pushing and embracing.
The sea is horizontal — restlessness, dissolution.
It carries Seo-rae through grief, and finally, through her disappearance.

<< “If grief envelops some like a crashing wave, there are some to whom it spreads slowly, like ink in water.” >>

Water is her fate: her life began with a shipwreck and ended in the sea.

<< “Throw that phone in the sea. Someplace deep where no one can find it.” >>

And there could be no ending more tragic and poetic — in that deep, unreachable place where she had asked him to throw her phone.

On conventional love vs platonic love:

<< “Why do I marry such men? Because commendable men like you won’t marry me.” >>

Hae-jun chose a wife who stands for order and respectability — the kind of love society expects.
She’s practical: when he can’t sleep, she takes him to doctors.
Seo-rae, instead, matches her breath to his. She doesn’t fix him — she feels him.

<< “I’d like to exchange my sleep with you, like batteries.”>>

Their love belongs to different worlds.
They don’t understand each other through words — but through emotion.
An impossible love, held in suspension.
A love where truly loving someone means to disappear, to sacrifice the self.
And sometimes, the greatest act of love is letting go.

Now I’m completely shattered