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Critics Consensus: The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.
Critic Consensus: The stylish Thirst packs plenty of bloody thrills to satisfy fans of both vampire films and director Chan Wook Park.
All Critics (113) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (92) | Rotten (21) | DVD (4)
A rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms 'Thirst' as one of the year's more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.
What 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.
The few funny or visceral scenes cannot hide the fact that in the year that the vampire flick has been reinvigorated... this is a major disappointment.
Thirst truly enters the dreamy, disturbing world of psychological horror. Park manages to sidestep a lot of the cliches of this subgenre by injecting seemingly inappropriate bits of humor.
The broad humour ends up undercutting the potential poignancy of the ending... Never mind, because it's not every day you see two vampires locked in such a colourful apache dance of destruction, filmed with such aplomb.
Leave it to the South Koreans to inject new blood into the seemingly eternal vampire oeuvre.
My affection for Thirst has mostly to do with the performance of Kim Ok-vin as Tae-ju, a sullen household slave who's transformed into a ravenous, punishing bloodsucker.
Kiddie shows like Twilight and Blood: The Last Vampire pale (you'll excuse the expression) in comparison.
Although somewhat irregular and overlong, this is a wonderfully stylish, well-directed and bloody vampire Korean film whose pitch-black humor contributes to set a hysterical, hugely bizarre tone in Park's surreal gore fest, with Kim Ok-bin in a priceless performance.
Super Reviewer
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Oh what could have been! In "Thirst" you have a great idea; that of a priest who, while trying to help mankind by participating in a vaccine trial that could save millions of lives, ends up with that tainted blood we all know so well. The moral implications are juicy - a man of God wrestling with the bloodthirsty (literally, he he he) beast now residing inside him - what a film this could be. 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.
A beautifull yet brutal vampire film.
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