Decision to Leave (2022): What am i missing?

Apologies if i may sound dumb, but this is what i experienced while watching this Park Chan-wook flick as an average moviegoer. I really loved his work in Oldboy and The Handmaiden, and both of them are one of the best movies that i've watched in my lifetime.

But I'm not sure about this one, probably because i didn't get what the director was trying to convey.

SPOILERS AHEAD

So basically, the story is about an insomniac detective, who's married to a nuclear power plant worker, but they only get to meet once a week because both of them work in different cities. One day, he encounters a case where a chinese immigrant is suspected of killing her husband, and becomes totally obsessed with her while investigating it. He follows her, stalks her and secretly takes pictures and voice recordings of her. Meanwhile, she being a smart and self-aware woman, knows all about it. But she choses to use it for her own advantage by distracting him from the investigation.

Now here's the confusing part. Both the critics and the director himself, have described it's genre as 'romance'. In fact one critic even labelled it as the 'Most Romantic Movie of the Year'. But imho, in order for a movie to qualify as a 'romance', the protagonists must have qualities that are 'redeeming' in nature, so that we can root for them throughout the film.

By contrast, the detective here is portrayed as a stalker and a cheater, whereas the immigrant is a morally grey character, who was a domestic abuse victim, but also has an almost psychopathic demeanor.

The film also mentions a Confucius quote (which is also the theme of the film btw), which says 'The wise love water (seas), whereas the benevolent love mountains', where the mountains and seas are metaphors for 'stability' and 'instability' respectively. We later get to know that the detective prefers mountains (which represents stability, a reference to his married life with his wife), whereas the immigrant woman prefers the seas (which represents mystery and unpredictability). And during the course of the film, the detective's character arc goes on so that he eventually gets drawn towards the sea, at the end.

When asked why he chose this particular theme, he said:

Park says viewers should pay particular attention to how his wife uses those pockets, as opposed to how Seo-rae (the immigrant) does.

“It’s true all the women in his life are taking things out of his pockets, but there’s an important difference between the two women taking things: His wife, despite the fact that she spent a long time with her husband, she doesn’t know what is in which pocket in his jacket. While Seo-rae knows exactly what to get from which pocket.”

“It’s about loneliness, about trying to find someone to be with,” Park says. “It’s about trying to find someone to love, despite all the loneliness in your life.”

https://www.polygon.com/23445882/decision-to-leave-ending-explained-park-chan-wook-interview

But the director fails to convince us as to why the quest to 'find someone to love' and combating 'loneliness' would require engaging in infidelity, instead of trying to repair the already existing marriage OR getting a divorce when things fail to work out.

When asked about what the ending meant, he said:

Park has often said what links his movies in his mind is the theme of responsibility — the way his characters do or don’t take responsibility for their own actions. In this case, Seo-rae’s way of accepting the consequences of her murders is a way of atoning that may leave viewers melancholy or angry, but Park feels it’s a significant choice for her to make either way.

However, upon a closer look, you'd realise her suicide has less to do with 'atonement', and more to do with 'teaching him a lesson'. At one point in the movie Seo-rae says 'The moment you said you loved me, your love ended. And when your love for me ended, my love for you began'. At the same time, she accurately uncovered his obsession with cold cases, and now, she leaves him with a mystery that he’ll never be able to unravel, i.e. whether she actually died or not, and what happened to her body. By choosing a form of death that will keep him endlessly guessing, she’s guaranteeing he’ll always remember and obsess over her, the way she obsessed over him.

This makes the ending less of a 'heartbreaking tragedy' like the Oldboy, unlike what the critics were suggesting, as I was never truly able to empathize with the protagonist (the detective) in the first place.

Overall, I found Decision to leave not having enough substance to warrant it's runtime. While the cinematography, editing and direction were excellent, the screenplay wasn't engaging at all, and it's pacing was slow too. It made me want to hurry up and finish the movie. And when it finally did, I found myself unsatisfied, at the end.

What are your thoughts on the movie?