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Bakjwi (Thirst)

Bakjwi (Thirst) (2009)

tomatometer

82

Average Rating: 6.9/10
Reviews Counted: 107
Fresh: 88 | Rotten: 19

The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.

65

Average Rating: 6.6/10
Critic Reviews: 23
Fresh: 15 | Rotten: 8

The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.

audience

74

liked it
Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 17,182

My Rating

Movie Info

Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-kyun, and Kim Ok-bin star in Oldboy director Park Chan-wook's frightener concerning a priest whose life takes a turn for the worst after he participates in a medical experiment to find a cure for a deadly disease. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Nov 17, 2009

$0.3M

Focus Features

All Critics (108) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (91) | Rotten (19) | DVD (5)

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed.

September 10, 2009 Comment (1)
Christian Science Monitor
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Thirst is a grim antidote to the sanitized, pale young things of Twilight, Supernatural and True Blood.

September 9, 2009 Full Review Source: Orlando Sentinel | Comment
Orlando Sentinel
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Thirst begins with great intellectual and artistic promise, then devolves into a repetitious mess of teeth, blades, necks, bites, arterial sprays, sex, sex, sex and death.

August 27, 2009 Full Review Source: Philadelphia Inquirer | Comment
Philadelphia Inquirer
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Thirst keeps coming up against the limitations of its various inspirations like a bumper car on a crowded court. On almost every other level, the film's audaciously entertaining, at times even quite moving. You just have to have the stomach for it.

August 20, 2009 Full Review Source: Boston Globe | Comment
Boston Globe
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Park aficionados are assured their fix of lurid imagery and baroque plotting, though straight-up horror buffs may get restless during the sluggish and murky middle section; Twilight fans need not apply.

August 20, 2009 Full Review Source: Chicago Reader | Comment
Chicago Reader
Top Critic IconTop Critic

[U]nlike most exercises in hematic excess--Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance, or Tarantino's Kill Bill--Thirst offers not the consolations of camp but the intensity of opera.

August 14, 2009 Full Review Source: New Republic | Comment (1)
New Republic
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Kiddie shows like Twilight and Blood: The Last Vampire pale (you'll excuse the expression) in comparison.

August 29, 2011 Full Review Source: East Bay Express | Comment
East Bay Express

Boldly erotic and playfully ponderous about sins of the flesh, "Thirst" rips open its bodice, and various veins, with arterial sprays of carnage and carnality. It's a savage, frank, fanged fusion of "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice."

October 31, 2010 Full Review Source: Suite101.com | Comment
Suite101.com

Perhaps no auteur is as suited to the vampire genre as South Korean director Park Chan-wook, a man who has made a career out of films full of sexual perversity, doomed romances and a seemingly insurmountable volume of blood.

October 21, 2010 Full Review Source: Quickflix | Comment

The degrees of shock, the foreshadowing and throwbacks throughout (both visual and in dialogue) all seem diminutive next to the amazing performances by the male and female lead.

April 15, 2010 Full Review Source: Fan The Fire | Comment
Fan The Fire

click to read full review

March 26, 2010 Full Review Source: Movies for the Masses | Comment
Movies for the Masses

A splendid grand guignol that thankfully avoids the Hallmark Card sensibility of the Twilight series.

January 1, 2010 Full Review Source: rec.arts.movies.reviews | Comment
rec.arts.movies.reviews

Begins as a film about a crisis of faith and ends up with a crisis of identity itself.

December 17, 2009 Full Review Source: Orlando Weekly | Comment
Orlando Weekly

The story of a noble priest resurrected as a vampire and plunged into a life of desire is opulently brought to the screen by one of South Korea's leading filmmakers.

December 11, 2009 Full Review Source: Screenwize | Comment
Screenwize

Something must have bored writer/director Chan-wook Park, because the second and third acts of Thirst play like scenes out of a totally different and much more incoherent film.

November 17, 2009 Full Review Source: Examiner.com | Comment
Examiner.com

This big screen guzzler has much to advise about the art of vampiring, including more efficient corpse feasting by cutting the feet of your human dispensers off at the ankles and draining them over the bathtub.

November 6, 2009 Full Review Source: NewsBlaze | Comment
NewsBlaze

What sets Park's film apart from the standard vampire picture has more to do with its tone, characterizations, and its strange blend of lyricism and pitch-black comedy.

November 4, 2009 Full Review Source: Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC) | Comment
Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)

Just when you thought you'd seen everything that could possibly be done with vampires, along comes something like Thirst.

October 29, 2009 Full Review Source: Deseret News, Salt Lake City | Comment
Deseret News, Salt Lake City

A truly bizarre movie, a tragicomedy that Graham Greene might have written in collaboration with Bram Stoker. But it's repetitive and overstays its initial welcome.

October 20, 2009 Full Review Source: Observer [UK] | Comment
Observer [UK]

Park is clearly an exceptional director capable of being weirdly funny, quirkily fantastical, brutal and sexy, sometimes at one and the same time. There's no one quite like him.

October 20, 2009 Full Review Source: This is London | Comment
This is London

Park directs with his usual eye-catching skill and attention to gruesome detail, and creates a story with strong emotional resonance.

October 20, 2009 Full Review Source: Shadows on the Wall | Comment
Shadows on the Wall

A rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms 'Thirst' as one of the year's more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.

October 16, 2009 Full Review Source: Time Out | Comment
More Critic Reviews

Audience Reviews for Bakjwi (Thirst)

A hyper-sexual and highly stylized meditation on the sins of the flesh. Song Kang-Ho is superb here as a man "living" in a perpetual state of crises. On top of this, one can see a higher level of maturity in the direction when compared to Park Chan-Wook's previous films. There is some very subtle yet amazing camera

August 24, 2011
axadntpron
Reid Volk

Super Reviewer

A priest accidentally infected with vampirism struggles with his new found earthly lusts and temptations while engaging in a love affair with an old friend's wife. Chan Wook Park indulges his fascination with the macabre with beautifully artistic visuals and a wicked streak of black humour as the vampire myth is once

December 2, 2009
garyX
xGary Xx

Super Reviewer

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Foreign Titles

  • Durst (DE)
  • Thirst (Bakjwi) (UK)
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