Rating: R | Runtime: 134 minutes
Release Date: April 30th, 2009 (South Korea) / July 31st, 2009 (USA)
Studio: CJ Entertainment / Focus Features
Director(s): Park Chan-wook
Writer(s): Park Chan-wook & Chung Seo-kyung / Émile Zola (novel Thérèse Raquin)

The Bandaged Saint.

Definitely not for everyone, Thirst is an interesting, intelligent take on the vampire genre. By using this horror film affliction, director Park Chan-wook weaves a parable on religion and faith, showing how two people on both ends of the spectrum value life itself.

All the tropes are here. Diseased characters have super-human strength, must stay out of the sunlight, and consume blood for sustenance. What they have not lost, however, is their humanity—or lack there of—from their past lives. There’s no better or more controversial way to express this than through the eyes of a priest. A man of God turned beast of evil.

How does he react to this need for blood and flesh? How does he come to grips with being a creature so close to the gates of Hell? How does he reconcile his new life and passions with the moral compass that’s long pointed true? It’s all touched upon within this adult romantic nightmare. Perhaps not always by giving us answers, but definitely stimulating our thoughts and feelings about life and death.

Priest Sang-hyun works in hospitals to give last rites and help the infirm cope with their mortality. After witnessing his latest death, he decides he must leave and do something for the good of humanity. Something that could help save people. A blind priest who’s acted like a father to him tries his best to dissuade the decision, pleading with him once more to become a doctor and heal his eyes. But it falls on deaf ears.

Sang-Hyun goes to an experimental facility working on the answer for an incurable disease called EV. The question of suicide—which plays a major role in the proceedings—initially comes into play now. Labeled ‘martyrdom for the devil’ to a parishioner, the priest is asked whether his intentions of being a volunteer with the disease is to perform some sort of elaborate euthanasia on himself. That question doesn’t even cross his mind, though. He has his prayer and God to get him through the ordeal, hopefully surviving and helping to create a cure for all.

We watch the blisters form and the blood pore from his mouth, eventually leading to a flatline and pronouncement of death before, like Lazarus, he rises once more. Unaware of his fate until deducing it through a series of tests, this single survivor from the EV test group finds that the blood transfusion given to him has turned him into a vampire.

The story truly begins here as Sang-hyun crosses paths with an old acquaintance in Kang-woo and his family. As a young orphan, Lady Ra fed him noodles and Kang-woo was his friend. Tae-ju, who was thought to be his daughter, is revealed as being an adopted ward who’s since become her ‘brother’s’ wife—yet ultimately is more slave dog than true member of the family.

Sang-hyun walks into all this just as the power of the blood pumping within his veins takes control. And this is where the moral ambiguity comes into play, creating an awkward number of scenes depicting this man of the cloth succumbing to the flesh. Constantly flogging himself for his arousal and impure thoughts, he still finds an unnatural attraction to Tae-ju—one which she shares.

Leading to one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes I’ve ever seen on film (both for the fact he’s a priest while she’s married to a man down the hallway and for the vampiric overtones of him doing his best to suppress his desire to sink his teeth into her shoulder), the union bonds them forever. But he values life too much and, while no longer considering himself a priest due to the fact he’s sleeping with this women as often as possible, he still won’t allow himself to murder for food. Instead, he feeds off a coma patient at the hospital. A man who admitted to him that his charity of choice was helping the hungry.

Thirst is shot with precise attention to detail and leads our eyes exactly where the filmmakers want them to go. Park is a master of tone and deliberate subtlety, at times making the film drag to lend an artistic aesthetic that’s his own. Everything ultimately leads to the moment where Tae-ju finally becomes a vampire herself. Being a woman without faith thanks to her harsh, loveless upbringing, death is death to her. There is no afterlife.

So, these two lovers evolve into a juxtaposition of true bloodlust and humane compassion. Sang-hyun begins helping people kill themselves to take their blood, providing a service his former self was very much against. Tae-ju decides to go out and seek prey, reveling in the sport of it all. The final act simultaneously depicting them as lovers and enemies is by far the strongest portion of the film. Everything pent-up in their lives before comes through unchecked, leading to the only logical conclusion. I applaud Park for giving us that beautifully tragic finale.

Song Kang-ho is fantastic as Sang-hyun, constantly internalizing his true self in order to be a better man. What he has become slowly takes over and the pain and suffering of that interior battle is permanently etched upon his face. As Tae-ju, Ok-bin Kim is both beautiful and darkly frightening. This meek young girl trapped in a family she runs from every night by pretending to sleepwalk cannot deny her desire for this priest she knew years before as a young man.

Her want overpowers any fear of what he is and she uses his own desires to her benefit by helping sever the familial bonds keeping her down—the guilt of which haunts both via some stunningly shot sequences of nightmarish imagery soaked in water and led by Ha-kyun Shin’s Kang-woo’s grinning laughter. Not only do the two evolve in demeanor and action, though, they also alter in visual aesthetic. Park and company change their wardrobe and appearance once they acclimate to being vampires, creating confident and indestructible versions of their former selves.

The wirework allowing for their abilities and strength to be shown is well-orchestrated and darkly comic at times (like most of the film), especially when lifting objects. Park always keeps an underlying humor in his films, making their tragic subject matter even bleaker. Thirst is no different. He once again gives us something to think about and process as each second passes.

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Kim Ok-vin (left) stars as Tae-ju and Shin Ha-kyun (right) stars as Kang-woo in Park Chan-wook’s THIRST, a Focus Features release. Photo Credit: Focus Features.