Nominated for Nothing: The tricky, swooning thriller Decision to Leave deserved better

They're destined to score zero Academy Awards, but they won our attention throughout a year (and awards season) like no other. Ahead of the 95th Oscars ceremony on March 12, EW is breaking down the year's best movies, performances, and directorial achievements that were nominated for nothing.

The film: When Jean-Luc Godard famously said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, he seriously underestimated Tang Wei. As Song Seo-Rae, the femme who may or may not be fatale in Park Chan-wook's playful, woozy, and gorgeously disorienting noir, she never touches a weapon on screen, though dead bodies and broken hearts seem to accumulate wherever she goes.

The film actually opens on bullet holes: two Seoul police officers (Hae Il Park and Go Kyung-po) taking their regulation target practice on the job. They're about to be assigned to the case of Seo-Rae's much-older civil-servant husband, whose violent death can't immediately be ruled either a suicide or a climbing accident, and Hae's insomniac detective Jang Hae-jun soon begins spending his nights staking out Seo-Rae's apartment, looking for clues beneath her placid surface.

Even while she's still a suspect, though, his interest seems to swell well past the purely professional. What begins as bureaucratic box-checking swiftly becomes a full-blown romantic obsession, and when the case moves on, it's not over for either of them — though that hardly sums up a narrative riddled with vertiginous camera tricks, ancillary intrigue (gangsters, pomegranates, turtle theft), and lines of hardbitten dialogue Raymond Chandler would die for ("Killing is like smoking, only the first time is hard").

Mubi Tang Wei and Park Hae-il in 'Decision to Leave'

Even for fans of Park's bloodied early-aughts classic Oldboy or his spectacularly twisted 2016 romantic melodrama The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave is a trip: a chimera of tangents and misdirections and strange, beguiling beauty. (It's also wildly well-acted, gorgeously shot, and intermittently very funny.) In a just world, there would at least be Oscar nods for direction, Ji-yong Kim's killer cinematography, and the phenomenal, unpinnable performance of Chinese-born actress Tang (Lust, Caution). Instead, the Academy decided to leave it.

Why it wasn't nominated: Parasite's sweeping 2020 triumph aside, South Korean cinema has struggled to connect with Academy voters; the first film to even make the Best International shortlist since the country began submitting in 1962 was the transcendent 2018 psychological thriller Burning, though it fell short of the final bracket. Parasite was the second, and went all the way.

Still, Park, a leading light of subversive filmmaking for more than two decades now, is hardly an unknown quantity on the international awards circuit: Oldboy won the Grand Prix at Cannes back in 2004, along with the eternal fandom of that year's jury president Quentin Tarantino (never mind the 2013 American remake). The Handmaiden, his most recent project before Decision, took the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2018.

Truthfully, it might have just been too rich a year, internationally: There are easily half a dozen films that could and should have made the cut in a category that currently holds five very good to indisputably great movies already: Argentina, 1985, EO, Close, The Quiet Girl, and the hulking prom king that will clearly beat them all, All Quiet On the Western Front (which has eight other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture).

Mubi Tang Wei in 'Decision to Leave'

Why history will remember it better than the Academy did: It already has: Decision has a slew of awards from critics' groups across the globe, and landed on the year-end top 10 of prestige publications ranging from The Guardian to the New York Times. But don't take one excitable writer's word for it; you can currently rent the movie or stream it on the subscription service Mubi (which also has a great back catalog of Park's earlier work). There are far worse ways to spend a winter night than to dive into Decision's murky waters, and get lost.

EW's countdown to the 2023 Oscars has everything you're looking for, from our expert predictions and in-depth Awardist interviews with this year's nominees to nostalgia and our takes on the movies and actors we wish had gotten more Oscars love. You can check it all out at The Awardist.

Related content:

• Park Chan-wook invented Decision to Leave's tragic ending decades ago

• International Oscars: The 10 best foreign-language films to watch before this year's ceremony

• Close review: When boys grow apart