After his immensely popular Vengeance Trilogy and the commercial misstep I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook returns with his technically brilliant, visually luscious vampire movie Thirst. The story combines sex, violence and perverse dark humor with dose of melodramatic tragedy inspired by Emile Zola’s 1867 novel Therese Raquin, the latter about a young woman entering into a feverish affair to escape from a cheerless marriage.
The story opens with Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a devout Catholic priest, who wants to save the world through his own suffering. He offers himself for a vaccine trial in the hope that it will help discover a cure for a deadly African virus. The trial proves lethal, but Sang-hyun rebounds from death after a blood transfusion, a miracle that prompts a cult following that reveres him as a savior with healing powers. The modest man of the cloth soon realizes that the vim and vigor his followers take for divine signs are in fact a side effect he picked up from the experiment — vampirism.
Unlike conventional vampires who crave only blood, Sang-hyun finds himself driven by carnal desire. He locks eyes with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of his childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). The sullen young woman lives with her sickly, infantile husband and tyrant mother-in-law (Kim Hae-sook) in a state of servitude. She is bored, dissatisfied and wants Sang-hyun to get her out of the torturous marriage. This is where the film taps into Zola’s story, but turns it into a wacky drama of gore, mass murder and all-consuming love.
In taking on the vampire genre, Park has done away with wooden stakes, garlic cloves, Transylvanian mystique and the seductive sophistication of Dracula. The film is full of drab, stifling domestic spaces and the nocturnal predator is played by an infected man of God with a hard-on he can’t flagellate away.
The dilemma of a vampire priest provides a promising setup for Park’s characters, who tend to be trapped in extreme circumstances not of their own making and are forced to make difficult moral choices as a result. However, when compared with the director’s previous films, such as Cannes-winning Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), Thirst is significantly less shocking and perverse, with the protagonist often portrayed as more comic than tragic.
Thirst goes nuts as it proceeds to become a melodrama obsessed with pain, ecstasy, and bodily fluids that carry guilty pleasures and deadly viruses. The explicit sex scenes go far beyond tame throat-sucking and extend the mutual oral euphoria to armpits and toes. Erratic in style and mood, the movie drags in the middle, and the focus on the pair’s all-consuming relationship significantly weakens the iconoclastic momentum promised by the transgressive storyline. A scene in which Sang-hyun rapes a female adherent amid a crowd of his followers toward the end of the film feels like a feeble reminder of Park’s anti-clerical agenda.
The story would suffer greatly without the fine performance of South Korean thespian Song Kang-ho, who carries the film’s themes of guilt and conscience. However, it is the 22-year-old Kim Ok-vin, also known as Kim Ok-bin, who is the eye-catching surprise in Thirst. The young actress, at first a creature of docility, evolves from a downtrodden housewife to femme fatale to blood-guzzling demon. She is the answer to the male fantasy that a sexually awakened woman is simultaneously irresistibly voluptuous and utterly destructive.
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