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Park Chan-Wook's latest film, Thirst, is a hard movie to get a handle on. I've been trying for about a month or so to come up with how I feel about it. It is safe to say that PCW's Vengeance trilogy are amongst my very favorite films, so the bar is set high when it comes to popping one of his discs into my player. Without the brilliance of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Thirst would be a world-class vampire film. But next to it and Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, it can only muster ordinary greatness. It is knowing what PCW is capable of, the heights of dizzying magnificence that he can achieve, that causes me to see the flaws in Thirst so glaringly. This is perhaps not the most charitable stance to take, since much of Thirst is simply amazing, but that is why I'm at such a crossroads with it. I've come to expect non-stop dazzle from PCW, and I was slightly disappointed not to get it here. If you've never seen any of his other films, then sit back and prepare to be blown away. If you are, then take a walk with me and let's see if we can crack this nut.
Thirst starts off well enough, with PCW's trademark intimate filmmaking. We see a door coalesce out of brilliant sunshine, punctuated by the harsh, rasping breath of a hospitalized man. The camera pans around to the corpulent fellow as he tells his nurse and his priest of a time when he gave two starving children a cake he was set to savor himself. He pleads with them to assure him that if God remembers nothing else, He will remember when the fat man gave up the thing he loves most, food, for two dirty-faced hood-rats he had no obligation to care about. In the space of two minutes we are ready to cry for a man we know nothing about, who only plays a peripheral role in the story. He then asks the hospital priest, Sang-Hyeon, to play a song for him on his recorder.
| And thus the recorder serves as baton and the story is passed off to Sang-Hyeon, played with exquisite poignancy by Kang-So Hong, a frequent collaborator with PCW (he was in both Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Joint Security Area). Sang-Hyeon is a troubled man, an orphan raised into the priesthood by his blind mentor. We see him counsel a nurse on her love life, while never having so much as kissed a woman himself. In point of fact, he frequently beats himself on the thighs with a ruler whenever he feels an erection coming up (ha ha). We only get a brief taste of his personality before we are hit with his rather questionable decision to abscond off to the country and take part in a medical trial seeking to find the cure for a deadly sickness called the Emmanuel Virus, EV for short, pronounced Eve. It should come as no surprise that the disfiguring virus, inexorably leading to a grisly death to all infected, only activates in males. Caucasian and Asian males, to be specific. | 
What a wonderful promotional image. |
And there is my biggest problem with the film. The whole origination of Sang-Hyeon's vampirism, and thus the ensuing tragic love tale, is a big deus ex machina rolled up with a one-armed bandit and stuffed into a Maguffin. It is never quite clear why he is suicidal enough to permit himself to be intentionally infected with EV, and it is only later in the game that we twig to the fact that it was blood they pumped into him right before his death that contained the vampire plasma that would resurrect him and give him his titular thirst. You see, EV causes severe blistering on the face and hands, and then massive internal bleeding, generally ejecting out of every hole in your head. The scene where Sang-Hyeon vomits blood through his recorder is an image that won't leave your head any time soon.
Tell me PCW doesn't know how to create an image? | Failing to have been defeated by death, Sang-Hyeon returns to the life he didn't care a whole lot for in the first place, except now everyone thinks of him as a Christ-like figure, something he is not comfortable with at all. Especially in light of his emerging supernatural abilities (strength, Wolverine-type healing abilities, and a lightness of foot that comes close to flight) and his desire to fill his mouth with warm, human blood. But still, the unholy priest strains to not take a human life. He does some morally questionable things to sate his need, but he never takes a life. A general thirst is not the only thing that drives, him, however: it seems that the resilient properties of the vampire blood that has bonded with his own is the only thing keeping his EV at bay. Without fresh blood, he begins to blister, and would soon perish for good. |
Here we run into another wall, though. If Sang-Hyeon was keen on death in the first place, and the idea of taking a life is so repellent to him, why not simply not feed, and blister up and singe? PCW solves this by conniving to place him in the line of fire of lust. While counselling a sick man, said man's mother recognizes Sang-Hyeon as the little orphan boy that used to play with her son when he was small. The son, played by another PCW alum Shin Ha-kyun (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), is married to Tae-Ju, who is not related but was raised in the house as his sister. Sang-Hyeon them becomes one side of a very dysfunctional quadrangle as he falls in "love" with Tae-Ju and the two begin an affair. An affair that leads to murder and a heavy strain on Sang-Hyeon's already tenuous grip on his remaining humanity.
Sang-Hyeon's relationship with Tae-Ju is an all too familiar one to most people, with her being a lying cunt who hides behind her cunt to get her way, and him being pathetically facile in his need to be loved by her, to believe that he is loved by her. As soon she gets a taste of his emotional infancy, she is all over that shit like a cheap suit, and pulls his strings like a little vampire puppet. He breaks his moral code thinking he is coming to her rescue, and the resultant mental schism leaves him reeling and even riper pickings for the sociopathic Tae-Ju. But when she finally gets what's coming to her, it only serves to make Sang-Hyeon's life even more complicated. He tells her at one point, after all sorts of excrement has hit the fan, something to the extent of "you're all that I have left." Which we all know is the wrong reason to stay in a relationship.
| Sang-Hyeon's relationship with Tae-Ju is an all too familiar one to most people, with her being a lying cunt who hides behind her cunt to get her way, and him being pathetically facile in his need to be loved by her, to believe that he is loved by her. As soon she gets a taste of his emotional infancy, she is all over that shit like a cheap suit, and pulls his strings like a little vampire puppet. He breaks his moral code thinking he is coming to her rescue, and the resultant mental schism leaves him reeling and even riper pickings for the sociopathic Tae-Ju. But when she finally gets what's coming to her, it only serves to make Sang-Hyeon's life even more complicated. He tells her at one point, after all sorts of excrement has hit the fan, something to the extent of "you're all that I have left." Which we all know is the wrong reason to stay in a relationship. |  That's a bad day for Tae-Ju |
The problems with Thirst lay not with the performances or the visuals: those are both top notch. You will be engrossed in the characters and rapt with their dealings, and PCW has an uncanny eye for framing his shots. One of my favorite scenes is when Sang-Hyeon jumps out of a second-storey bathroom window in a snit, stalks down a dimly-lit street, and punches a light post. The post reverberates with the impact, and has the priest storms off, the post slowly keels over and hits the ground. All of this is done as a wide shot from above the street, and all in one take. There is no MTV-style frenetic editing and quick-cut orgies in a PCW film. The man is an extremely prepossessed filmmaker, and his confidence with telling a story through visuals is unparallelled in the world of directors.
No, the problem with Thirst are the weak plot points. Once we get past those hurdles the movie is wonderful, but they just stuck with me, like when you try to take an aspirin and it doesn't go down at first, and leaves that slime trail down the back of your throat. It seems like PCW wanted to tell a story about a vampire priest in love with a sociopathic seamstress, and didn't quite know how to get there. It's kind of like buying a CD (you remember those, right?) because you heard a few tracks on the radio (you remember that, right?) that you thought were amazing, and finding out the other tracks on the disc are merely filler swill. That is how I felt watching Thirst. The overarching emotional themes resonate, and the visuals are breathtaking, but instead of taking a scenic road to get there he stomped through Tokyo like Godzilla.  Nothing like a little murder to bring a couple together. | No, the problem with Thirst are the weak plot points. Once we get past those hurdles the movie is wonderful, but they just stuck with me, like when you try to take an aspirin and it doesn't go down at first, and leaves that slime trail down the back of your throat. It seems like PCW wanted to tell a story about a vampire priest in love with a sociopathic seamstress, and didn't quite know how to get there. It's kind of like buying a CD (you remember those, right?) because you heard a few tracks on the radio (you remember that, right?) that you thought were amazing, and finding out the other tracks on the disc are merely filler swill. That is how I felt watching Thirst. The overarching emotional themes resonate, and the visuals are breathtaking, but instead of taking a scenic road to get there he stomped through Tokyo like Godzilla. |
Oh, I almost forgot: if nothing else, this movie has lots of humping in it; all sorts of strange Asian sex. Armpit licking, toe-sucking, straight-up under-panty crotch-grabbing.
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