Decision to Leave Review

Park has made a film about desire in which almost nobody touches, and the restraint sharpens him. The central device is surveillance as courtship: Hae-jun watches Seo-rae through binoculars and the film keeps cutting him physically into her apartment, so that the act of observing becomes an intimacy the character will not name. Tang Wei plays a woman whose second language is the film's whole subject, since every phrase she reaches for through a translation app arrives slightly wrong and slightly truer.

Park Hae-il gives the detective a fastidiousness that reads as decency until it reads as evasion. The formal invention is relentless, with match cuts that collapse distance and a fondness for putting the camera inside eyes, phones and corpses, and it never feels like showing off because each trick carries information. The second half relocates the story and asks the audience to rebuild its bearings, which costs real momentum. The ending, on a beach with a rising tide, is the most romantic thing Park has ever filmed, and it does not require a single embrace.