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
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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
work in this movie and I give him credit for doing something interesting with the tired vampire genre. All in all, this film is very unique and like all Park Chan-Wook films, worth a watch just for the experience.
August 24, 2011
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
again deconstructed for the modern audience. Beautifully performed, particularly by Song Kang-ho as the tormented holy man in a nicely understated interpretation of a blood sucking monster who sees his condition as an unwanted curse rather than a gift. In fact technically, there is very little to be faulted here as aside perhaps from a rather slow first half, its pretty much a perfectly executed dark fantasy; the Crouching tiger style wirework of their undead acrobatics are particularly effective. The biggest problem is the source material as the vampire film is so ubiquitous its difficult to find anything here that hasn't been done before. Although this is the more complete film by far, the format is very reminiscent of Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos and the post modern concepts have been explored numerous times over the years. Certainly one of the most elegant examples of the genre but let's face it, vampires have been done to (un)death.
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