Park Chan-wook has begun work on his next film, a roman­tic mur­der mystery

As of late, Park Chan-wook has been zig-zag­ging between the West and his native Korea with each suc­ces­sive project. He first head­ed to Amer­i­ca in 2013 for the Eng­lish-lan­guage thriller Stok­er, then returned to Korea in 2016 for The Hand­maid­en, then all around the globe for the BBC-pro­duced minis­eries The Lit­tle Drum­mer Girl – and now, he’s con­tin­u­ing the pat­tern with the news of his next feature.

Today, Vari­ety broke the news that Park has announced his next fea­ture film, Deci­sion to Leave, a moody mur­der mys­tery with a roman­tic hook. Bet­ter still, Park’s already got the ball rolling, with pro­duc­tion pro­ject­ed to com­mence before the end of the month.

The Vari­ety item includes a short syn­op­sis, detail­ing a plot con­cern­ing a detec­tive (played by Park Hye-il) gone to the moun­tain­ous coun­try­side to get to the bot­tom of a homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tion. As is cus­tom with noirish sto­ries of this nature, he comes to sus­pect that the dead guy’s wid­ow (Tang Wei of Lust, Cau­tion fame), and as is also cus­tom with the genre, he devel­ops the hots for her as well.

For those curi­ous about how this might ulti­mate­ly be rolled out, back­ing comes from CJ Enter­tain­ment, the stu­dio that amassed much of Par­a­site​‘s cash wind­fall as it swept the globe. Per­haps by Cannes next year, if the fes­ti­val goes for­ward in a nor­mal fash­ion, they’ll have set up Park’s lat­est project as the next world­wide sen­sa­tion with a big pre­mière in Com­pe­ti­tion, keep­ing up the momen­tum from Bong Joon-ho​‘s block­buster.

This leaves one big ques­tion, how­ev­er. Last we heard, Park’s next film was going to be the S Craig Zahler-script­ed West­ern revenge flick The Brig­ands of Rat­tle­creek, with a high-pro­file cast start­ing to come togeth­er. Today’s news would seem to sug­gest that that’s been put on a pos­si­bly per­ma­nent hold, though if he’s going to main­tain his pat­tern of alter­na­tive Eng­lish- and Kore­an-lan­guage films, maybe he’ll pick that one back up after he’s wrapped pro­duc­tion on Deci­sion to Leave.