Are you hungering for that rare vampire movie with serious intellectual heft, ravishing undead, biting passion and a healthy splash of irony?
Wait no longer. Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst” should satisfy.
Though the subject is vampires, this is not a horror film, at least not in any of the traditional ways we think of horror with its thrills and chills, shrieks and shocks. Instead, Park has created a rumination on morality and mortality that is not at all deadly, but funny and profound and at times intensely erotic.
“Thirst,” the Jury Prize winner at the Cannes International Film Festival this year, stars Song Kang-ho as a brooding young priest whose efforts at self-sacrifice lead him into a high-risk experimental medical program. A tainted blood transfusion turns out to be lifesaving in ways he never imagined.
The priest becomes the predator, but in what has become a modern-day trend (see “Twilight”), the undead cleric has adopted medicine’s governing principle — first do no harm. All well and good except there is the matter of that unquenchable thirst that makes even the best intentions a struggle.
Park, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Chung Seo-kyung, has surrounded Song with trials and temptations. The most deadly turns out to be carnal desire in the winsome shape of Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), a devil in a blue kimono.
Soon there is an intriguing web of deception being spun around and by our tortured priest as he moves between siphoning blood from patients at a nearby hospital, assisting suicides and a weekly mah-jongg game.
Mah-jongg, and soon other far more deadly games, is played at the house where Tae-ju lives. Her situation there is complicated — an abandoned child the family took in, raised like a daughter by the domineering matriarch, but now married to the idiot son, who was a childhood friend of the priest.
Sexual relations and relationships are usually somewhere at the dark heart of Park’s work. Mix that predilection with vampire mythology, long cloaked in sexual complexity and it was clear that he would have much to play with.
“THIRST”
R for graphic bloody violence, disturbing images, strong sexual content, nudity and language. 2 hours, 13 minutes. Written and directed by Park Chan-wook; starring Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-kyun, and Kim Ok-bi. Opens today at the Mayan.
