By Miles Trahan
What’s South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook been doing since 2003’s Old Boy? Getting in touch with his feminine side. Beginning with 2005’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (going by the shorthand Lady Vengeance here in the States), Chan-wook — with writing partner Seo-Gyeong Jeong — has been slowly but surely casting off the more twisted cynicism of his first three features, allowing the unabashed romanticist who has long dwelled within him to bloom. Don’t be fooled — while billed as a blood-soaked thriller, Chan-wook’s latest film is really, at heart, a love story.
A dark, twisted love story soaked in blood.
Loosely based on Emile Zola’s “Therese Raquin”, Thirst follows the exploits of Sang-hyun (the ever-reliable Song Kang-ho), a Catholic friar working for the emergency ward at a local hospital, where he provides solace to and leads the sick and dying to a supposed “better place” in their final, desperate moments. Quite admirably, Sang-hyun just wants to help people. Unfortunately, this desire leads him to take part in a risky (if you consider a nonexistent success rate merely “risky”) clinical study testing the effects of a vaccine intended to fight the deadly EV, an African virus which causes one’s skin to boil, their flesh to rot, their fingernails to fall out like loose teeth and, ultimately, kills them. As expected, the endeavor proves fruitless — after allowing himself to contract EV Sang-hyun himself slowly falls to pieces, and dies willingly, knowing he has done his part and will be rewarded by God for doing so. The problem? He wakes up again.
Sang-hyun finds himself in a strange predicament: In exchange for having cheated death, he now walks through life like a ghost, plagued by an unquenchable thirst for human blood. And there’s the rub, really — despite his best efforts to help people, the friar is now forced to more or less feed on them, to quench his thirst by literally consuming the “life essence” of others. For a Man of God, of course, Sang-hyun’s dilemma only worsens; he knows what he is doing is wrong, but he has no choice in the matter — in his eyes God has forsaken him, cursed him to a fate worse than death, twisted his desire to do good into something harmful, ugly and shameful. While walking through life a conflicted, confused mess he crosses paths with old friend and perpetual man-child Kang-woo (Chan-wook regular Shin Ha-kyun) and his family, who are more than happy to provide him with lodgings and the benefits of their company. There Sang-hyun takes a liking to Kang-woo’s bitter, unfulfilled wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), which leads to a tempestuous affair right under her mother-in-law’s nose, which itself leads to the sloppy, unnecessary execution of her well-meaning (if dim-witted) husband.
Oddly enough, Tae-ju longs to be a vampire herself, not easily dissuaded by her lover’s nay-saying. Once romantic tensions stemming from the husband’s murder boil to a fierce confrontation — in which the now catatonic mother-in-law watches in horror as Sang-hyun slowly relieves his fair lady of the burdens of life with his bare hands — she eventually gets her wish. An emotional wreck, Sang-hyun takes Tae-ju’s life only to desperately try to bring her back a mere moments later, mixing his blood with hers to give her heart the necessary jolt it needs. It works, strangely enough, with one caveat — Tae-ju is now a vampire too, with a blood lust that seriously eclipses his own. Now Sang-hyun finds himself facing an even more pressing dilemma, trying in vain to keep the love of his life from carrying out a one-woman war against mankind, desperately seeking both her attention and affection while actively working against her desperate attempts to indulge her own insatiable appetite. “Stop being humane”, she chides, “You’re not even human.”
Clearly Thirst is no Twilight (that’s a compliment), working instead to subvert the typical blind romanticism of lesser vampire films and offer a more realistic take on a very unrealistic concept. Which isn’t to say Chan-wook’s film is entirely straight-faced — Thirst continues very much where I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay left off, mixing intimacy with spectacle, hard-boiled hyper “reality” with pure celluloid escapism. The film combines a veritable ton of elements and veers from drama to slapstick at an astonishing rate, and not all of it works — it runs a bit overlong, sometimes the jokes fall flat, and sometimes the whole thing just feels a bit too overwrought, perhaps a bit too over-the-top. When it does work, however, it’s quite a sight to behold. A crisis of conscience, a comment on consumption and one of the most unconventional love stories to grace the screen in ages, Chan-wook’s film has a lot to answer for, and more or less does so with the grace and pitch-black humor that has become the filmmaker’s stock in trade.
Joint Security Area and the “Vengeance” trilogy proved Park Chan-wook is a more than capable filmmaker, a man brimming with talent and a thematic voice unlike any other in his native Korea or abroad; Thirst proves that he won’t let prestige deter him from having fun. Though the result is sometimes frustratingly difficult and just a bit overstuffed, Chan-wook’s latest is a weird, oddly personal, oddly touching and unabashedly risqué film that marches blindly to a beat all its own. In the end, it’s up to the viewer to try to keep up.
8.5 out of 10