Thirst

Year: 2009

Duration: 02:14:01

Directed by:  Chan-wook Park

Actors: Kang-ho Song, Ok-bin Kim and Hae-suk Kim

Language: Korean (English subs)

Country: South Korea

Also known as: Bakjwi, Жажда, Ceci est mon sang, Kan arzusu, Kawaki, Pragnienie, Sede de Sangue, Zizen, 

Description: Sang-hyun, a priest working for a hospital, selflessly volunteers for a secret vaccine development project intended to eradicate a deadly virus. However, the virus eventually takes over the priest. He nearly dies, but makes a miraculous recovery by an accidental transfusion of vampire blood. He realizes his sole reason for living: the pleasures of the flesh.

Sang-hyun, the hero of Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst,” is many different things: a Roman Catholic priest; a selfless volunteer in a dangerous medical experiment; a reluctant faith healer with a cult following; a vampire. And “Thirst” itself, which won the Jury Prize this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Park has long been a favorite, is equally protean. It is a bloodstained horror movie, a dark comedy, a noirish psychodrama of crime and punishment, a melodrama of mad love, a freehanded literary adaptation (of Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin”) and, of course, a vampire movie.

Unfortunately, it is also less than the sum of its parts — overly long, lacking in narrative momentum and too often choosing sensation over coherence. Mr. Park has an undeniable knack for choreographing bloody, sensual set pieces. While nothing in “Thirst” is quite as shocking or perverse as some of the best-known moments in his “Old Boy” or “Lady Vengeance” — by which I mean that no children are murdered and no live cephalopods swallowed whole — there are elegantly presented servings of sex and gore. Mr. Park and his cast offer moments of creepy, winking humor and also of intense emotion, a combination that is a hallmark of this director’s oeuvre.

The most vividly rendered feeling, suggested by the film’s title, is desire: for human blood, for sexual release and also for something purer and more soothing. Sang-hyun, despite his vampirism (which follows his voluntary infection with a disfiguring tropical virus), clings to a sense of righteousness and decency. Instead of maiming or killing innocent people, he discreetly slurps from the intravenous tube of an overweight patient in a hospital coma ward. Later on, when his appetite (and that of his lover) grows, Sang-hyun proposes turning to assisted suicide rather than outright murder. Even his sexual hunger is shadowed by guilt and colored by tenderness as much as lust.

It helps that Sang-hyun is played by Song Kang-ho, one of South Korea’s most inventive and reliably sympathetic actors. More somber and stiffer than he was in Bong Joon-ho’s “Host,” one of the best monster-horror movies of recent years, Mr. Song broods and suffers persuasively. He also slyly signals some of the more preposterous aspects of his character. This poor priest, longing to help humanity, finds himself covered in blisters and under quarantine and then subject to sensory freakouts that are scant compensation for his superhuman powers.

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Thirst 2009