On a mission to bring around a fearsome computer virus , Priest Sang - hyeon is infected with vampirism – along with a roily sight of animal urge and guilt . If you like darkly fishy , weird tarradiddle , do n’t omit Thirst from Park Chan - wook ( “ Oldboy ” ) .
Spoilers ahead !
hunger opens today in the United States , and is the long - wait new pic from Park , whose cultus strike Oldboy is a disturbing , ultraviolent mindfuck . Like Oldboy , Thirst is about fictitious character who yearn for release from their prison , only to identify that freedom is another kind of John Cage . And using an unsettling combination of slapstick , repulsion , and pathos , Park pleasingly turns the lamia mythos on its head .
San - hyeon ( played by Song Kang - ho from “ The Host ” ) is a priest in an substitute - reality South Korea where a black-market infestation - comparable virus cause people to barf blood , grow pustules , and apace die . To aid the patients he tends , the priest offer to give Korea and take part in an experimentation where he ’ll be infect with the virus and doctors can try out experimental cures on him . Miraculously , after several gory scene of infection , San - hyeon makes a full recovery under the strange doctors ’ care . He returns home , where he becomes a kind of saint – everybody wants him to bring around them , or to bless them . But he bit by bit realizes that his retrieval was not due to medical science . He ’s become a vampire , and he needs to drink blood line to prevent the transmission from rejoin and killing him .
At this point , Thirst sincerely enters the dreamy , disturbing world of psychological horror . Park manages to sidestep a lot of the banality of this subgenre by injecting seemingly inappropriate bits of humour – we see San - hyeon hear to drink blood “ virtuously ” by sip from the IV lines of comatose affected role . There ’s a puckish satire of Catholicism here , too , with San - hyeon ’s very existence seeming to embody church hypocrisy .
When the priest decides to join some parishioners for mah - jong , he satisfy Tae - ju , the beautiful and frustrated married woman of his dim - witted puerility admirer . An orphan , she was take away in by his friend ’s class , treated like shit , and essentially force to marry a mankind who needs his nose wipe for him . With his vampy desire turned up to mega - story , San - hyeon ca n’t resist Tae - ju , and they fall into a heated but flaky intimate thing . I honestly could n’t decide if the sex prospect were intend to be wacky or hot or both , and that made them seem somehow more intimate – even though there is n’t a plenty of nudity , you feel like you are watching something deeply individual as these inexperienced fan bumble their path through a haze of strong-arm desire .
While San - hyeon feels guilty for all he ’s doing , Tae - ju embrace their human relationship with a shuddery wildness ( young actress Kim Ok - vin play her with feral childishness ) . She wants nothing more than to escape her claustrophic family life , her needy husband and controlling mother - in - law . And she manages to pull San - hyeon down a dark path to break free of them . With his non-Christian priest ’s robes , superstrength , and newfound carnality , San - hyeon has come to body forth the amatory vampire myth – except that he ’s still seek to be moral . Eventually , he bring Tae - ju into undeath with him and their world really gets fantastic .
Throughout the motion-picture show , we never forget that these characters ’ fresh position as monsters does not release them from the burdens of humanity . They can not just fling away their responsibilities and become joyful creatures of the night . The non-Christian priest still has his parishioners and chum of the fabric ; and Tae - ju has her ( awful ) kin and household . No matter how craven the two of them get , they still take a creepy sort of responsibility for their community .
It ’s this excited paradox – abandon couple up with obligation – that makes our characters so intriguing . They are trap by social expectations in a society that does n’t acknowledge their existence .
There are certainly flaws in Thirst , not the least of which is its long running time – almost 2 hours – which causes some of the funniness to go sour . scenery that should be flying , freaky ballets of violent comedy are drawn out into unwished queasiness like a SNL skit that ’s gone on too long . Perhaps that ’s Park ’s intent , but it feels bunglesome rather than artful . And a subplot about the couple ’s guilt over what they ’ve done to Tae - ju ’s married man palpate complimentary and tacked - on . We already know they feel guilty – that ’s the point of the pic – so there ’s no need to labour it home further .
Despite these problem , the pic is one of the most compelling and genuinely foreign portraiture of vampire life I ’ve ever seen . In this way , it resembles allow The Right One In , which never denies complexity to its characters . Thirst will get under your skin , and scenes from the picture will taint your mind for days after , refuse to permit you go .
thirstiness via IMDB
Vampires
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