• What’s Good: A genuine vampire film that ranks among the best. It innovates as it celebrates.  :-F
• What’s Not: Pacing issues make it hard to watch but they are essential in building the slow tedious tension that makes up these creatures never ending (but wish they did) lives.
• Faux Peter Traverse Quote: This film delivers the scares! It will suck you dry! Watch out, it bites!

Zombies out, vamps in. The fanged ones have not just reemerged from the darkness but redefined what they are and how they live. In that vein (ha!) this is one of the best vampire films ever made. The reason is in the approach. Imagine “Oldboy” with vampires–something totally original yet eerily familiar. Chan-wook Park, one of maybe two or three notable directors/auteurs from this decade (good god, that few?), approaches vampires from a new perspective; one that is eye opening in its symbolic/mythological richness. The reason Park is one of the few notable new directors around is for the simple reason that, when faced with a new genre, he is able to define for himself what Vampires are rather than borrowing from past films and stories. There are so many different angles to approach the film and, then, so many different ways to read it that I am reminded of the equally brilliant “Let the Right One In.”

Park jumps into the shoes of a newly turned vamp with great results. The vampire noob is a priest (Kang-ho Song) who, hoping for martyrdom, signs himself up as an experimental test patient for a rare disease that only usually affects westerners (a nice wink to the racial preference past vampire lore). Instead of dying a bloody death his body reacts… differently. After Song’s performances in “The Host,” “Memories of a Murder,” “The Good the Bad and the Weird,” he’s one of the best actors around. Though the film is funny, his performance is something of a miracle in that’s is dead serious and at time tragic but not a drag. Anyway, he becomes a national celebrity, a Lazareth-like figure, who, since he survived, is believed to be a saint. Well, as he comes to find out… he’s not. I love this biological angle because here is a man who has not only become a vampire but has to do so alone and with no guidance, spiritual or otherwise; I mean, being a vamp’s not so bad when you got Tom Cruse showing you the ropes. Even during his transformation he works at a hospital, helping the dead and dying as he is both. One day a woman begs him to help her son. He enters her house and family and this chance encounter changes the flow of the entire film. He goes on to meet the unhappy wife (co-star Ok-vin Kim) to an inept husband to the wretched mother. Thinking he’s going to hell anyways, Father Sang (played by Song–trying my best to keep the names straight) then enters the world of sexual expression, except for him sex is very close to blood sucking and he even does both at the same time. That’s a central motif. There are these fabulously set up shots of lovers sucking each others extremities (mouth to thumb, toe to mouth), a kink that is totally new to the genre, and this eventually turns to the mutual parasitic sucking of each other’s blood. Blood in most vampire films are more a function of set design and decoration than story development, splashes of color as it were, but here it has weight and context and value. When it’s shared and when it’s spilled it means something!

This cursed, diseased creature is not dead and loving it. He’s not even romantic. Just confused. Existentialism takes on a whole new meaning for this priest and for vampire films as a whole. Though the film could be called a “vampire romance” (not to be confused with the generic “Twilight” stuff which is fine but, lets face it, pap) Park’s thesis is much darker and more subversive. The notion of vampires/vampyrism in this film is a metaphor for not only one’s search for faith but human relationships. Two people find each other and while the blood is really flowing at first, it takes on a torturous, soul sucking configuration where the notion of spending an eternity with your mate becomes hell on earth. As the couple in this film suck each other dry, “Thirst” can be called the “Sid and Nancy” of vampire films without any irony. And I love the notion that the man of faith figures, KNOWS, he’s going to be in hell forever because he’s a man of faithwhile his lover, who has no faith, will simply turn to dust before facing the void of nothingness. The Priest’s religion, in that sense, is even more tragic because he believes in a concept that damns him. That’s such a sad but profound concept. The film critiques the role of religion in Korea as well. What Park does here is a similar thing he did in the underrated “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.” Religion is both superstitious and silly but also a moral compass that seems to exist only as a gauge for how far from grace his protagonists fall. A priest turned vampire is not just a cute gimmick but a heartbreaking reality under Park’s direction.

The film takes the most unexpected turns. It’s rhythms are strange and offputting but kind of wonderful too. Expect the film to run long (especially in the middle) but the unuasually stretched plot helped me feel for how awkward and unnatural this guy’s life became. One thing doesn’t so much lead to another as much as they happen for unknown or soon to be known reasons. When the priest “becomes” a vampire we don’t get the usual montage. When he is about to have sex for the first time we don’t get the sex scene we expect. When he DOES have sex, we doget a steamy scene but it goes on for so long and extends so far past its welcome that sexyness gradually transitions into disturbing. When he feeds for the first time, it’s not a thrilling moment of moral I-can-do-anything-ness liberation but an awkward and humorous moment where he latches onto the floor like an inverted bat and sucks from the IV of a brain dead fat man (this, for some reason, reminded me of the mosquito that drank from Uma in “Kill Bill”). The plot also doesn’t do what’s expected. It’s funny when it should be said (a vamp lifts up a comotosed woman, and the chair she sits on, in front of company), thrilling when it should be romantic (the priest grabs the girl and goes roof jumping) and a thriller when it should be, er, whatever. The last twenty minutes, set in the tortured girl’s childhood home (now painted all white with TVs projected recorded shots of the street as if it was a window), owe more to Hitchcock than any Asian vampire thriller. So many surprises!

Don’t come to “Thirst” for something enjoyable. Come to it for something different. Something great.

Grade: A-