Bakjwi (Thirst) (2009)
Average Rating: 6.9/10
Reviews Counted: 108
Fresh: 88 | Rotten: 20
The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.
Average Rating: 6.6/10
Critic Reviews: 27
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 8
The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 18,052
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
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Cast
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Ha-kyun Shin
Kang-Woo -
Hae-suk Kim
Mrs. Ra -
Song Kang-ho
Sang-Hyun -
Ok-bin Kim
Tae-Joo -
Park In-hwan
Old Priest -
Dal-su Oh
Young-du -
Song Young-Chang
Seung-dae -
Mercedes Cabral
Evelyn -
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Bakjwi (Thirst) Trailer & Photos
All Critics (109) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (91) | Rotten (20) | DVD (5)
A rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms 'Thirst' as one of the year's more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.
Top CriticWhat the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed.
Thirst is a grim antidote to the sanitized, pale young things of Twilight, Supernatural and True Blood.
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.
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.
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.
Kiddie shows like Twilight and Blood: The Last Vampire pale (you'll excuse the expression) in comparison.
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."
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.
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.
click to read full review
A splendid grand guignol that thankfully avoids the Hallmark Card sensibility of the Twilight series.
Begins as a film about a crisis of faith and ends up with a crisis of identity itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just when you thought you'd seen everything that could possibly be done with vampires, along comes something like Thirst.
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.
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.
Park directs with his usual eye-catching skill and attention to gruesome detail, and creates a story with strong emotional resonance.
Audience Reviews for Bakjwi (Thirst)
Super Reviewer
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- Sang-Hyun: Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me. Like a cripple without limbs, let me not move freely. Remove my cheeks, tht tears may not roll down them. Crush my lips and tongue, that I may not sin with them. Pull out my nails, that I may not grasp nothing. Let my shoulders and back be bent, that I may carry nothing. Like a man with tumor in the head let me lack judgment. Ravage my body sworn to chastity leave me with no pride, and have me live in shame. Let no one pray for me. But only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.
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Foreign Titles
- Durst (DE)
- Thirst (Bakjwi) (UK)
Sadly, the moralistic aspects of this tale get thrown by the wayside less than halfway through as the film dissolves into a bloody mess (again, literally). This Korean entry certainly has an odd style going for it, and for a time it works in a very linear and matter of fact way. Director Chan Wook Park has no qualms about showering us in torrents of blood as well as the more mundane human rituals, including farting and relieving oneself - stuff that served no purpose in the film and frankly I could have done without.
I was astounded at the amount of detail and time spent on things that didn't matter, while glossing over or simply blithely ignoring some pretty severe plot holes. The film seems to totally miss the point it was initially trying to make, as absurd sequence follows absurd sequence, so by the time you get to the ultimate scenes you almost laugh instead of taking it seriously. Any moral message has by this time become so buried by pointless scenes and a lack of cinematic focus that all sense of poignancy is lost.
The film is just so uneven, even in its CGI. There are some seamless bits where boils and pustules slowly vanish; vanquished by the vampire blood - but then there are some truly awful Crouching Tiger imitation jumping scenes that are truly laughable, and truly add nothing to the tale - really, this uber strong vampire thing once again glosses over the real meat of the matter - that in order to survive, a vampire requires the blood of the species he used to be. That should have been the focus here, along with how a priest slowly loses his battle with the beast within - suffering a loss of faith in the bargain - a metaphorical gem just waiting to be mined - but not in this film.