Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009)

Thirst: Bloody Communion

Sang-hyun has fled the flaming light of religiosity and discarded his anemic beliefs, victim of a desire that burns deep in his veins. He is a priest who tires of the vapid ritual of death, a man who wishes to help others who suffer needlessly: he trades the invisible Sacraments for physical sacrifice. He offers his body as a tool to cure the dreaded Emmanuel Virus: a tongue-in-cheek name evoking the lascivious softcore film, as the pleasures of the body will lead to his downfall. Sang-hyun suffers the torment of the damned and dies with righteous intentions but is mysteriously resurrected. He is the only survivor out of 500 patients and is anointed savior, as true believers flock to his side awaiting his healing touch.

Director Park Chan-wook finally does to Catholic, Inc. what the Church has repeatedly done...rape its own congregation. Park purposely plays with the standard vampire conventions by showing Sang-hyun reflected in mirrors and not averse to the cross, but then shows him hanging like a bat, peeping into the human world of lust, searching for his own garden of Eden.

The film is darkly humorous, depicting a man without faith and a woman who never acquired it, and their mutual decline into an egocentric world of violence and ever-thirsting passion. THIRST is a morality tale, as the seductive Tae-ju pretends to be abused by her husband and convinces Sang-hyun to murder him: the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions. When he learns of the deceit, he again murders but this time reanimates their affair, as she imbibes his bloody Communion.

Tae-ju sees a world full of sheep to quench her appetite but a final vestige of morality still infuses Sang-hyun and he fights these urges, promising never to kill for sustenance…but he’s already a killer. The ex-Priest must extinguish this mortal craving for a flesh and blood redeemer so he molests a young girl, destroying the misplaced hope of his followers: it is both a grim and perverted scene. Tae-ju’s nihilism versus his lapsed Catholicism leads them to a lonely cliff, the ocean beating its own life affirming rhythm against the rocks, and all becomes ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Final Grade: (B+)

Recommendations: The Birds, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Funny Games

All reviews copyright Korova, Ltd. Visit Alex at his Home Theatre Blog, http://korovatheatrepresents.blogspot.com/

Thirst

Thirst, or “Bat” in Korean (hence the movie poster), is the latest creation of Park Chan Wook, director of another movie reviewed on these pages, Oldboy.In a sentence, it’s a stylish vampire movie featuring sex, blood and death. It’s also pretty funny, occasionally horrific, and very graphic. The star of the show is Kim Ok-vin, who plays the at-times humble at-times vicious Tae-joo wonderfully. I’m not a vampire movie fan, but I really liked it.

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Thirst - Review

Forget teenage girl Twilight fad bullcrap, think more: pain, lacerations, more pain, dark grave humor, and eroticized violence. Oh yes, and Thirst deservedly won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year.  Thirst is directed by Park Chan-Wook who directed my favorite movie of all-time and he doesn’t dissapoint with this film. It is a bloodstained horror movie, a dark comedy, and a dark drama of crime and punishment. While nothing in Thirst is quite as shocking or perverse as some of the material in Oldboy or Lady Vengeance, there are elegantly presented servings of sex and gore.
Thirst involves a Catholic priest named Sang-hyun who becomes infected with vampire blood through a blood transfusion. Trapped between his faith and his lust for blood, his morals are tested when he becomes reunited with a friend, Kang-woo, and falls in love with his wife Tae-Joo. Though Tae-Joo is initially repulsed by the fact that Sang-hyun is a vampire, she overcomes her fears and the two begin a highly sexual relationship which quickly turns deadly.

You need to know that this movie is beautifully shot and composed. However, Thirst is no Oldboy, no, it’s not that great, but it’s still good. The film doesn’t rely on any vampire conventions one might expect. Where Thirst begins to fall apart is around the midway point. Although the focus of its narrative movement is not always clear, in its best moments, Thirst offers something of the poetic force of cinema’s timeless masterpieces. Park Chan-wook’s latest work Thirst, like other great movies, makes you forget you’re watching one, and you won’t be able to stop it from shaking up every cell in your body unless you dart for the exit.

Although the priests life has been saved due to the transfusion, his senses have been amplified, his strength has become superhuman and he can leap tall buildings in a single bound. However, he has to sleep in a closet during the day, and if he doesn’t feed on human blood, the grisly effects of the disease, such as vomiting blood, peeling fingernails, etc. return, and he’ll die. The most troubling side effect to the priest, though, is his sinful desire. A small regret is that the movie does not go as far as the novel to feature more character development. But, when the majority of America is watching and obsessing over stupid kiddy crap like Twilight, its movies like this and series like True Blood that deserve the real praise.

Final Grade: B

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Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009)

One of the leading contemporary Asian film auteurs, Park Chan-wook has been a name synonymous with ‘revenge’. Most well-known for films such as Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Sympathy For Lady Vengeance (2005) which make up his unofficial ‘vengeance’ trilogy, Park has now established himself not only as a film festival favorite, but also arguably the most highly-rated Korean filmmaker of the last decade.

Winning his second Jury Prize at Cannes (the first was for Oldboy), Park’s new picture, Thirst, is distinctive in style and form, albeit in a morbid kind of way. It is hard to find an apt description to Park’s style, but in Thirst I would say it is close to a cross between Cronenbergian grotesqueness and Lynchian weirdness. And if I may add, a tinge of Kubrickian coldness as well. The film centers on a Catholic priest, Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho), who volunteers his body for a medical experiment to find a cure for a rare, deadly disease. He miraculously survives but he turns into a vampire as a result.

Thirst, mind you, is not a genre horror film. Similar to Tomas Alfredson’s acclaimed Swedish vampire romance Let The Right One In (2008), Park’s film is predominantly a drama with few elements of horror. It touches on the human flaw of lust, or more precisely, the sin of lust at the expense of religious faith. Sang-hyeon’s faith is tested to the limit after he turns into a vampire. He then suffers from an identity crisis. Is he a respected priest as known by the public, a savior of sorts? Or is he a bloodsucking creature whose unearthly desires continue to overwhelm him?

A shy, attractive woman, Tae-joo (Kim Ok-vin) with an abusive husband and an overbearing landlord lady becomes the target of Sang-hyeon’s sexual passion. In the film’s most erotically-charged scene, they have sex in a hospital ward late at night next to a comatose patient. The narrative does not give the viewer an easy way out; it is as predictable as next month’s weather. As the film proceeds, images begin to distort perceptions of characters and their actions. As a matter of fact, things get more bewildering, violent, and macabre. This is where comparisons with Cronenberg and Lynch come in. The violence and gore are as unsettling as they get, but Park, to his credit, makes them a pleasurable indulgence.

The performances of the cast are generally good, though I have to single out Kim who turns in a remarkable display of vulnerability and later, becomes convincingly psychotic. There are occasional uses of CGI with which Park shows mastery of including eye-popping scenes of vampires leaping from roof to roof. Camera movement in Thirst is outstanding with the use of outrageous shooting angles and audacious point-of-view shots. The final few shots are haunting but they retain a sense of poetic fatalism inspired by ‘30s French cinema.

In this truly brilliant film, Park has delivered a stunningly original take on the traditional vampire horror sub-genre. Strange and beautiful, Thirst ought to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film come next January.
  SCORE: 9/10
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Recommendations: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), The Visitor

Singapore's Most Prolific Film Blogger @ www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com