It’s a stylishly violent vampire flick. It’s a sexy, sex-filled story of forbidden love. It’s a winking black comedy about the dysfunctions of family, marriage and religion. For fans of special effects, camera tricks and the rest of Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook’s twisted ticks, Thirst is a bloody wet dream.
Moving away from the non-stop intensity of Oldboy and the surrounding “vengeance trilogy” with which the director made his reputation, and following up on his equally off-kilter 2006 rom-com I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, Chan-wook has let all of his bats out of the belfry with this one. The story opens with Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song, also the star of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), a priest who is sick and tired of seeing the patients he prays for fall like flies. Breaking off from his flock, Sang-hyeon links up with a controversial clinic attempting to cure the deadly Emmanuel Virus. A transfusion of tainted blood leaves him as the only survivor of the clinic’s tests, but also brings his long-suppressed lusts to the surface with rapidly escalating results.
Taking his miraculous recovery as a sign from the heavens, Sang-hyeon’s patients believe him to have supernatural healing powers and come to him in huddled masses. This leads him back to Tae-joo (Ok-vin Kim), the wife of a childhood friend now living in an unpleasant home environment as the servant of her overbearing mother-in-law. As much as he wishes to rescue her, the priest-turned-vampire maintains much of his religious guilt, striving as hard as he can to avoid killing despite needing blood to survive. Like the evil Silas of The Da Vinci Code, Sang-hyeon also suppresses his sexual desires with flagellation in several wince-inducing scenes involving a woodwind instrument.
As things really start heating up, the film’s characters begin leaping from building to building with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style grace, as the camera skilfully follows them with some of the most inspired and technically jaw-dropping shots in recent memory. While Chan-wook could have benefited from a bit of editing to pick up the story’s slight sagging, his lingering over countless memorable images and sequences — a home painted white and lit with neon to provide a sunlight surrogate, the haunting of a watery ghost and a randy sex scene in a hospital bed, to name but a few — will remain in the minds of viewers long after the credits have rolled.
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