There’s a moment about a quarter of the way through Park Chan-Wook’s “Thirst” where Song Kang-ho (the doughy hero of “The Host”), playing a conflicted priest infected with vampirism, volleys across rooftops, carrying his disbelieving crush (Kim Ok-vin) in his arms. It’s a moment that can only be described as movie magic. The camera careens with him as he hops from one rooftop to the next, and it’s the kind of breathless, assured filmmaking that literally winds you.
The only problem with “Thirst,” opening today, is that as the movie progresses, there are far too few of these moments and what was once a zingy, bold, experimental take on non-Western vampire mythology devolves into a kind of sludgy, overwrought family melodrama. Somewhere along the way, it loses its fangs.
It starts promisingly enough, with priestly Song Kang-ho going to Africa (or somewhere) to receive an experimental medical procedure meant to stop a leprosy-like virus. He’s the only patient to survive, but he gets a little more than he bargained for: the effects of the virus will stop, but only if he consumes human blood. (Okay, this may sound a little convoluted. That’s because it is. While this prologue sets up an interesting engine for him contracting the disease, it also seems terribly unnecessary. Why couldn’t he just get it from a blood transfusion? It worked for David Cronenberg and the dearly departed Marilyn Chambers in “Rabid.”)
So he returns to his town, to his life as a priest. Mercifully, his parish is adjacent to a hospital, and he soon finds a morally shaky but preferred method of obtaining blood: by siphoning it from comatose patients. This works for him and it works for us — Park Chan-Wook, no stranger to the joys of movie violence (he’s responsible for the lauded “vengeance trilogy” of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy,” and “Lady Vengeance”) – provides us with rivers of blood and more goopy-slurpy sound effects than an entire season of “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”
As the movie wears on, and the focus shifts from his life of quiet solitude and growing self-loathing as the monster within gnaws away at his soul, to a doomed romance (with said crush), to a sort of bizarre family drama/tragedy, the fun drips away from the story, like so much drained blood.
By the time it reaches its prolonged, tragic-comic climax, we as an audience have grown wary of its constant shifts in tone and context, which at first felt unexpected and refreshing. When it began, “Thirst” seemed like a bold reinvention of a tired genre (especially in today’s vampire crazed culture), with a number of solid subplots ripe for the picking (including one where the doomed priest is seen as a kind of messiah to those afflicted with the leprosy disease — this is revisited but not in the way you’d expect), but ends up rather limp and unfocused; it’s a series of spooky-scary-gory vignettes, which are all interesting but when added up never form a cohesive whole.
It’s a shame, too, because as a filmmaker, Park Chan-Wook seems to have honed his considerable talents.
His mastery of visual effects, his shot compositions and editorial prowess, are all top-notch. It’s a gorgeous movie, too, with the contrast between daylight’s warmth and nighttime’s chilly sobriety being a highlight. And he knows how to goose an audience like nobody else — squirms seemed to ripple outwardly from the screen at our screening, with even the most hardened film fan crunching up into a disgusted ball.
But the parts don’t add up, and for all its lustrous art house prestige (critics will undoubtedly dub this the vampire movie teeny-boppers should have been psyched about, not “Twilight” — and they’re right, to a degree), “Thirst” isn’t much more than a half-entertaining/half-infuriating midnight movie. Because the things that are great about the movie are almost unparalleled (seriously, its technical mastery is stunning), but story-wise it goes so off the rails to such an extreme degree, for so long, that it’s hard to forgive in the end.
The fun you were having at the beginning (which includes some deliciously absurd moments) seems so far away from where you wind up. It’s easy to be dazzled by all the color, ambition and flair, but one can’t forget the nagging lack of overall substance. For all its flying viscera, “Thirst” ends up being surprisingly bloodless and for it’s epic running time, it’s pretty telling that you’re still left craving more. [B] — Drew Taylor.
[ed. here’s our review of “Thirst” from Cannes which doesn’t feel vastly different from this review].