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“Will you please stop obsessing over that woman?” a co-worker of a detective named Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) asks. But at this late point in Decision to Leave, Park Chan-wook’s new movie, we know requesting this of Hae-jun is like demanding an apple shed its skin’s red gleam or a mirror lose its reflective surface. This infatuation takes up too much of his world for him to so simply get rid of it.

It would have been out of character not long ago for anything like romantic obsession to upstage Hae-jun’s professionalism. This painstaking investigator — actually the youngest-ever in his department to be promoted to police inspector — is so devoted to his work that he productively funnels his insomnia into overtime stakeouts, and sometimes even willingly skirts danger by exactingly retracing the final steps of the latest corpse he’s circling around for extra insight. (He’s also a master of the foot chase.) But that meticulousness starts receding after Hae-jun begins looking into the death of a 60-something-year-old rock-climbing enthusiast, Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok). After his body is found at the bottom of his latest rocky conquest, it seems at first glance like a tragic accident. But some of his much-younger wife Seo-rae’s (Tang Wei) behavior afterward fans suspicions of foul play particularly for Hae-jun’s rasher younger deputy (Go Kyung-pyo).

Read the rest of the column at 425.