Thirst (2009)

Official trailer

Thirst gets its 8 by being the most morally serious vampire film of its era wrapped inside the most lurid.

Park Chan-wook, the Korean director behind Oldboy, took the vampire premise and ran it through Catholic guilt, sexual obsession, and pitch-black comedy, producing a film that’s by turns horrifying, hilarious, erotic, and tragic. It’s messy and overlong and tonally reckless, and it’s also among the most original things the genre has produced this century. Few directors would even attempt this combination.

Fewer could make it work as often as Park does.

The premise is pure Park. A devout, kind priest volunteers for a medical experiment to find a vaccine for a deadly disease and dies. A blood transfusion resurrects him and turns out to have made him a vampire. A holy man becomes a predator. His faith and his new nature go to war, and the war is the film, played for tragedy and farce in the same breath.

I adore this film’s nerve. It had me laughing at a murder, squirming at a love scene and feeling for a vampire priest inside the same half hour, and I can’t think of many directors I’d trust to try that. It’s too long, and I felt every minute of the middle hour, but I’ll take Park’s mess over most filmmakers’ tidy work.

The Priest Who Becomes a Monster

Song Kang-ho plays Sang-hyun, the priest, and the performance holds the film’s wild swings together. He plays a good man, humble and self-sacrificing, who finds himself with a hunger for blood and a sudden, overwhelming sexual appetite that his vocation never prepared him for. The comedy and the horror both come from watching a decent, repressed man lose control of a body that now wants things he’s spent his life denying.

Park’s master stroke is making the vampire a priest, because it loads every appetite with guilt.

Sang-hyun doesn’t want to kill, so he initially feeds on the comatose and the willing, trying to remain moral within an immoral condition. He tries to be an ethical vampire, and the film treats this struggle seriously even as it mines it for dark comedy. The collision of real faith with real monstrousness gives the film a weight that vampire stories rarely carry.

I think Song is the reason the film holds together at all. He plays the priest’s decency so sincerely that I kept hoping he’d manage to stay good, even when I knew better.

Kim Ok-bin and the Turn

The film’s second half belongs to Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju, an unhappy young woman trapped in a stifling marriage and household, who becomes Sang-hyun’s lover and then something far more dangerous. Her performance is a marvel of transformation. She begins as a meek, abused victim and evolves into something feral and liberated and monstrous once the vampirism reaches her, throwing off every constraint with a glee that’s both exhilarating and terrifying.

Tae-ju is the film’s engine in its back half.

Where Sang-hyun is tormented by what he’s become, Tae-ju embraces it completely, freed by it from a life of submission. Her appetite has no guilt attached, and that contrast, the priest who agonizes and the woman who revels, drives the film’s escalating chaos. Their relationship curdles from passion into a lethal power struggle, and Kim plays every stage of it with total commitment.

Kim’s Tae-ju is the performance I’ll remember from this film. The shift from meek wife to gleeful killer is thrilling to watch, and I found her far scarier than the priest who made her.

Tonal Recklessness as a Strength

Thirst refuses to stay in one tone. It’s a religious tragedy, a sex farce, a domestic black comedy, and a gory horror film, often within the same scene. Park plays a murder for real horror and then for slapstick as the lovers try to hide the body from the victim’s mother, who’s present but paralyzed and can only watch with her eyes. The film is constantly daring you to laugh at things that shouldn’t be funny and to be moved by a story this lurid.

The body-hiding scene with the paralyzed mother watching is where I knew I was in Park’s hands. It’s horrible and I laughed out loud, and then I felt a little sick for laughing. Not many films can make me complicit like that.

This tonal whiplash is deliberate and mostly thrilling. Park is one of the few directors with the control to swing from the sacred to the absurd to the horrifying without the film flying apart. The recklessness keeps the audience off balance, never sure whether the next scene will devastate them or make them laugh, and that instability is its own kind of power. The guilt-ridden priest and the gleeful murderess generate comedy and tragedy at once.

The Length and the Indulgence

The film’s flaws are flaws of excess. At well over two hours, Thirst is too long, and Park’s unwillingness to cut his own invention shows. The middle section, as the relationship between the two leads develops, sprawls. Subplots accumulate. The film has enough ideas for two movies and tries to fit them all into one, and the seams show in a back half that loses some of the tautness of the setup.

Park’s indulgence is the price of his ambition. A more disciplined director would have made a tighter, lesser film, and Park makes a sprawling, overstuffed, strange one. The bloat is real, though. I’d have cut twenty minutes of subplot from the middle and lost nothing, and the finale would have arrived before my patience ran thin.

Is Thirst worth watching?

Thirst gets its 8 as a hugely ambitious, original vampire film, a tonally reckless fusion of religious tragedy, black comedy, and erotic horror that only Park Chan-wook could have made. Song Kang-ho grounds it as the agonized priest, Kim Ok-bin electrifies the second half as the liberated monster, and the central idea of a holy man at war with his own appetites gives the film real moral weight. It loses points for excessive length and a sprawling, indulgent middle.

The 8 comes from the nerve and from Song and Kim, who make a vampire priest and his runaway lover feel like people I cared about even while they did monstrous things. It stops short of a 9 because I felt the length, and a film this wild needs to keep moving. Park swung for everything at once here, and he connects far more often than he misses.

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