About Decision to Leave
A Korean homicide detective with chronic insomnia investigates a fall from a mountain in the foggy port city of Busan and falls hopelessly in love with the dead man’s Chinese widow. Park Chan-wook constructs the film like a perfumer assembling a top note, a heart, and a long, ruinous base.
Released in 2022 and running a tight 2h 19m, Decision to Leave sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in Korean, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Decision to Leave is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Park Chan-wook currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Tang Wei, Park Hae-il, Lee Jung-hyun — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Decision to Leave
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Boulder, CO — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- New Orleans, LA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Park City, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Fairfax, VA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Ventura, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- River Falls, WI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Kingston, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Heber City, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Baltimore, MD — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Winchester, KY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Mayfield Heights, OH — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Decision to Leave is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 19m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.