Park Chan-wook returns to the detective-thriller territory that made his name with this 2022 South Korean drama, only here the puzzle isn't just who did what — it's what the investigator is willing to feel while he's supposed to be staying objective.
What is Decision to Leave about?
A veteran detective named Hae-joon catches a case that should be routine: a man is found dead after a fall from a mountainside. Procedure points him toward the man's wife, Seo-rae, as the obvious first person to question, and Hae-joon does what any careful investigator would — he starts digging into her routines, her alibi, the small inconsistencies in her story. What complicates the whole thing is that the more time he spends watching her, the less this feels like ordinary casework to him. He finds himself drawn to her in a way that has nothing to do with the case file, and that pull starts to blur the line between an investigator doing his job and a man who no longer fully trusts his own judgment. The film builds its tension less around a single dramatic reveal and more around that slow, uneasy slide — professional distance eroding scene by scene.
About the cast
The cast is led by Tang Wei and Park Hae-il, joined by Lee Jung-hyun, Park Yong-woo, Go Kyung-pyo, Kim Shin-young, Yoo Seung-mok, and Jung Yi-seo, filling out the detectives, colleagues, and figures around the central pair.
Context & significance
Park Chan-wook both directed and co-wrote the film, and it sits at the crossing point of three genres at once — drama, mystery, and romance — rather than settling into any one of them cleanly, which is part of what critics singled out about it. At 138 minutes it's a patient, deliberately paced piece rather than a fast procedural, built around mood and framing as much as plot momentum. It comes from South Korea and is presented with its original Korean dialogue, and it landed to a strongly positive critical reception on release, with particular praise for its visual craft and control of tone.
Watching Decision to Leave on Ktime
Decision to Leave is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched entirely in Farsi or followed with Farsi text over the original Korean. The page and details are free to browse for anyone; actually streaming the film just requires logging into a free K-Time account. It's the kind of deliberate, mood-driven cinema K-Time makes a point of bringing to Farsi-speaking audiences properly subtitled and dubbed, not as an afterthought.