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.
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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.
