Thirst, or Bakjwi to give its original Korean title, is the new film by Park Chan-wook, the renowned director of the Vengeance trilogy. It is a dark comedic tale of a priest, Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), who is rapidly losing his faith. Deciding to take the ultimate sacrifice, he volunteers to take part in an experiment to find a vaccine for a deadly virus.
Sang-hyun is a fine player of the recorder, and when not using the instrument as a self-flagellation tool on his thighs to keep feelings of desire at bay, he sits and plays tunes in his bedroom. Once he is infected with the deadly virus, it is during one of these musical moments that Chan-wook shows us what kind of film Thirst is going to be. We pan around Sang-hyun as a river of blood falls out the end of the recorder.
Fans of Park Chan-wook would expect something like this. His Vengeance trilogy is a visual feast, with a taste for the extreme, and Thirst doesn’t disappoint. Once Sang-hyun leaves the hospital, covered in bandages – seemingly unaffected by the virus – the film takes a left turn and begins to head towards the genre it’s directed at.
You see, Thirst is a vampire film. Or at least it’s been described as reinventing the vampire genre. I’m told that Twilight has recently done that, but I’m not a 14-year old girl so I wouldn’t know. In fact, I wouldn’t mind watching Twilight – I’m a huge fan of Kristen Stewart, for all the wrong reasons. She’s hardly Oscar-material, but always good to watch.
Speaking of eye-candy, Thirst has a beauty of its own in Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju, the love interest of Sang-hyun. She lights up every scene and steals the show from Kang-ho, a veteran of Korean cinema. Once our hero begins to realise he’s a vampire, he meets Tae-ju and everything starts to unravel. Desperate to remain a good person, Sang-hyun tries to feed his thirst for blood not by killing people, but by sucking blood from an obese coma-patient in the local hospital. Inevitably, Tae-ju becomes infected, and from that point on things really do take a turn for the worse.
Like the Vengeance trilogy, Thirst is all over the place in terms of pacing. My only criticism is that the film is slightly overlong, and takes a good while to get going. Watching it with a festival crowd, most of the audience knew what to expect and were happy to wait for the pieces to fall into place. A wider international audience would not be as forgiving, and you can almost predict the film’s future as a cult classic.
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