Bakjwi (Thirst) Reviews
East Bay Express
Kiddie shows like Twilight and Blood: The Last Vampire pale (you'll excuse the expression) in comparison.
Suite101.com
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."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Quickflix
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Fan The Fire
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Movies for the Masses
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Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
rec.arts.movies.reviews
A splendid grand guignol that thankfully avoids the Hallmark Card sensibility of the Twilight series.
Orlando Weekly
Begins as a film about a crisis of faith and ends up with a crisis of identity itself.
Screenwize
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Examiner.com
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.
Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Deseret News, Salt Lake City
Just when you thought you'd seen everything that could possibly be done with vampires, along comes something like Thirst.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Observer [UK]
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.
This is London
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Shadows on the Wall
Park directs with his usual eye-catching skill and attention to gruesome detail, and creates a story with strong emotional resonance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Top CriticA rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms 'Thirst' as one of the year's more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Times [UK]
With its rapacious appetites and forceful directing style, is definitely a vampire film for grown-ups.
Guardian [UK]
Not one of Park's best films, but it has bite.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daily Telegraph
This fervid extravaganza is easily Park's best film since Oldboy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Little White Lies
Red blood and black humour spurt hard as Thirst reveals itself to be one of the most deliciously skewed incisions into the vampire romance subgenre.
Sky Movies
There's plenty to get your teeth into - just a shame you've got to wait so long for the main course.
