Thirst (2009)

I'm not going to spend a lot of time here talking about the return of the vampire to the international zeitgeist, or whatever. Critics have been going on and on about that for months. Suffice it to say, from True Blood to Twilight to Let The Right One In, vampires are kind of "the thing" again.

Thirst, from Korean director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), is the latest vampire movie to hit the screens. Twilight it's not. The movie is gory, violent, and has two or three really graphic sex scenes that kind of made me blush.

The story follows Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Catholic priest who somewhat inexplicably volunteers to participate in an African study to find a cure for the Emmanuel Virus, an ebola-like malady that causes painful blisters and ends with those afflicted vomiting up very cinematic quantities of blood. Predictably, Sang-hyun is infected and, at deaths door, undergoes a blood transfusion. He survives (the only one in the study to do so) and goes back to Korea, where he suddenly finds himself craving blood, as well as yearning for "sins of the flesh." He's hailed by the faithful as a miracle worker. A desperate mother begs for him to pray at the bedside of her loutish son, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), who is stricken with cancer. Sang-hyun drifts into the bizarre family's orbit and soon falls for Kang-woo's beautiful but disturbed wife, Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-bin). Eventually Sang-hyun defies his priestly vows and has a lot of noisy, acrobatic sex with Tae-Ju, and -- as his vampire nature begins to assert itself -- falls under her manipulative, femme fatale spell.

Park Chan-wook is one of those culty genre directors (like Guy Ritchie and Takashi Miike before him) that critics like to frame as an heir to Quentin Tarantino. And, to be honest, Park's films do seem to owe a lot to Tarantino. He likes to take pretty straight-forward genre concepts and throw them into a blender with a lot of other stuff. Thirst is no different. It's a violent, occasionally scary, often funny vampire movie with allusions to classic noir and family melodrama, along with a couple fart jokes for good measure. There's more than a little Double Indemnity at work here, side-by-side with some Three Stooges slapstick and a pinch of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The effect of all this is sporadically interesting, sometimes effective, very often frustrating.

The problem -- and it's not a new problem for Park -- is that, once you get past all the razzle-dazzle, it quickly becomes clear that the dude can't tell a story to save his fucking life. Park knows what to do with the camera, and he crafts more than a few dazzling scenes (nothing quite as cool as the infamous fight sequence in Old Boy, but dazzling nonetheless). These scenes, in isolation, feel lifted from a much better movie. There are some really bravura moments, such as the scene where Sang-hyun shows off his new vampire skills to Tae-ju by taking her into his arms and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. And the conclusion by the ocean is spectacular. But, once it's all strung together, the movie itself becomes an incomprehensible mess. It's not that it's confusing as much as, after awhile, really boring. After about an hour I had no idea where the story was going, and not in a good way. There's no emotional logic connecting one sequence to another, and the characters are pretty much insipid and unlikable across-the-board. Half-a-dozen visually breathtaking scenes don't mean anything if, in the end, you don't give a shit.

That's not to say there's not a lot to like here. The cumulative effect of all these cool sequences is deceptive; if you're not paying attention, you may mistake this for a good movie. I just wish Park had put more of his efforts into joining it all together with more than the movie equivalent of cheap twine and old duct tape.