Thirst

A vampire film from the director of Oldboy is not what you'd expect from any of those words.

Fairly or not, both Park Chan-Wook movies and vampire movies carry certain expectations. Park is, of course, most famous for his 'Vengeance Trilogy' - Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance - a collective fever dream of deliriously stylish baroque revenge schemes, filled with hammer fights, eye-gouging and, in one instance, a scene that gives horrendous new meaning to the old line about a queue at an execution. Vampire movies, though tamed of late by Twilight and its ilk, by definition run on blood. Thirst, then, billed as Park Chan-Wook's vampire movie, would seem to give the Korean provocateur license to run riot, dousing the screen in creative blood-letting whilst restoring a sense of tragic grandeur to the genre. Which he does. In a way. But Thirst is defiantly not the film the words 'Park Chan-Wook's vampire movie' might lead fans to expect.

Rather than unremitting ultra-violence, Thirst instead traffics in intense melodrama, openly inspired (i.e. it's right there in the credits) by Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin.. Only, y'know - with vampires. Park regular Song Kang-ho is a priest who volunteers himself as a test subject for an experimental vaccine. Mistake number one. Infected with the fatal disease, Song makes a miraculous recovery minutes after being pronounced dead, the effects of a late blood transfusion taking hold. Hailed upon his release from hospital as a miracle-worker, he is beset by the sick and needy of his increasingly large congregation, hoping to share in some of his saintly healing powers.

Amongst these is Shin Ha-Kyun, a childhood friend now suffering from cancer, into whose family life the priest finds himself drawn. The illness starts to return, however, with Song also discovering that sunlight now burns him, and the only thing that keeps his symptoms at bay is a fresh supply of human blood. That vampiric window-dressing out of the way, the film unexpectedly settles into Double Indemnity territory, Song entering into an intense, unhealthy affair with Shin's wife, Kim Ok-bung, and the couple proving increasingly dangerous to those around them and, eventually, themselves.

Though it deals with similar thematic territory to that of a standard vampire film - corruption of innocents, guilt, vampirism-as-metaphor-for-disease - Park's film does so in a totally disarming manner. That Song is a vampire is almost incidental, his bloodlust a mere gateway drug to his actual lust for Kim. Around the desperate isolation of his lovers, Park crafts a series of unforgettable images and set-pieces: a cloaked Song leaping from building to building with athletic grace; a comatose patient's IV turned into a straw; a living room painted fluorescent white and streaked with scarlet; a mute woman spelling out an incriminating message with a bloody fingernail.

It isn't completely successful, choosing to meander where the Vengeance Trilogy careened forward and thus losing any real sense of dramatic urgency for long stretches of its two hour-plus running time. As part of an ongoing worldwide rehabilitation of horror movie tropes, though, taking generic origins and pushing them to their logical conclusions when applied to the trials and travails of the real world, it would make a hell of a double bill with Let The Right One In. Cult glory beckons.

Thirst is available now on DVD and Blu-Ray on Tartan Palisades