Being a vampire priest sucks at Park Chan-Wook’s thirst

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by Park Chan-wook

See this It offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Morbid It’s been delayed until 2021, but you don’t have to wait that long to see these other vampire chronicles and bloodsucking tales.

Thirst (2009)

As resolutely Catholic a vampire movie that he’s committed to filming, Park Chan-wook Thirst He drinks a lot from the crackdown project, and then argues that he’s probably still a better option than the alternative, at least when it comes to monsters who drink blood. After all, the gentle priest Sang-hyun (ParasiteSong Kang-ho) might not have been especially happy before receiving the blood transfusion that makes him a supernaturally powerful creature of the night. (He seems downright eager to martyr himself in the name of medical science, in fact volunteering for an experimental trial in which everyone involved seems certain that it will end in his death.) But at least he didn’t spend his nights courting suicides for his last drops of blood, or cutting people’s feet in his bathtub, to get his dose.

A darkly comic reply to the Buffy-and-Twilight The notion of a “good vampire” set, Park’s film is a slow deconstruction of each justification that its protagonist presents in the service of satisfying his hunger for the undead. No matter how Sang-hyun tries to spin it: drink from “generous” coma victims, seek frequent religious acquittal for their transgressions, and treat like hell not to kill anyone, there really is no ethical consumption of other people under the vampirism. It seems especially not after a chance encounter with childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), and even more especially with Kang-woo’s constantly annoying and miserable wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), awakens all the carnal sensations of Sang-hyun. He spent his entire life before death trying to self-flagellate.

Thirst it’s too slow for its own good, with Sang-hyun and Tae-ju’s mutual sexual awakening consuming large (and graphic!) percentages of their runtime. But the director who made Older boyThe famous hallway sequence had not lost its taste for a perfectly composed and shocking image, be it for the revelation of Sang-hyun drinking from his “donor’s” IVs as a claret-clad Krazy Straw or the specter of Guilt literally stands between two lovers in the middle of the act. In a movie about the dangers of controlling your impulses, Park rarely does the same thing, and Thirst it is deeply satisfying for its indulgence.

Availability: Thirst is available to rent or buy at Amazon, Google play, iTunes, Youtube, Microsoft, Fandango, DirectTVand VOODOO.