OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Thirst

It’s been hard to escape from the sequel of a certain vampire film, even for those of us who have earnestly endeavoured to do so. That said, the winsome tale of whining teens does provide a fecund contrast to Park Chan-wook’s grown up take on the pitfalls of a succubic love affair. Where the shallow “Twilight” focus is on teen abstinence, the brooding “Thirst” is all about adult passion.

Father Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) just wants to help people. As a Catholic priest doling out the last rites and offering what religious support he can in his local hospital, the seemingly powerless Sang-hyeon is tired of seeing patients slip from his grasp and from their tenuous grip on life. Enlisting in a medical experiment in an effort to find a vaccine against the horrifying EV disease, Sang-hyeon apparently dies only to later awake and find himself the sole survivor of 500 test subjects.

Mistakenly hailed as a modern miracle by relatives of the sick patients who cling to any chance for the survival of their loved ones, Sang-hyeon goes back to work at his old hospital. Lady Ra, an acquaintance of Sang-hyeon from his childhood, is convinced of his healing powers and invites him to pray for her simpleton son Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) to which Sang-hyeon reluctantly obliges. When Kang-woo’s cancer apparently vanishes, Lady Ra takes Sang-hyeon into her home where he soon catches the eye of Kang-woo’s mousy wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin).

But all is not well with Sang-hyeon. Discovering that a blood transfusion was the cause of his mystifying survival of the disease, he is soon craving for the claret. With one taboo broken (albeit draining the red stuff from willing patients at his hospital), Sang-hyeon is quickly succumbing to pleasures of an altogether more carnal kind with Tae-ju waiting in the wings…

Nominated for the Palm D’Or at Cannes and joint-winner of the Jury prize, “Thirst” has some serious critical clout behind it, Park Chan-wook’s status as a festival favourite notwithstanding. There’s plenty to recommend it too; the premise of a priest unexpectedly ending up as something unholy through the desire to do good is a decent start, coupled with the off-kilter aspect that it deals with the Catholic faith which is a niche religion in Korea.

For this reviewer at least, the film just doesn’t quite deliver the way it should. Far from a paucity of ideas, it’s perhaps the over-abundance of motifs and vignettes that prevent the film really hanging together. Is it a film of a devout man’s crisis of faith? A battle against lust? A twisted love story? Park Chan-wook tries to have his cake and eat it by interweaving all three but such a strategy never quite pays off.

That’s not to say there aren’t delightful moments, and plenty of Park Chan-wook’s trademark askew humour. From a girl’s love of running barefoot through the streets at night to a mother’s incarceration in her own body, along with the permanent watery presence of cuckold Kang-woo, there are things which you just won’t see in another film.

Yet there are too many narrative lurches, threads that never pay off and that story conflict at its core which makes “Thirst” ultimately unsatisfying. At 133 minutes (or 145 minutes for the Director’s Cut) it’s a long film and it takes too long to get going. Similarly, by the time of the love affair comes around, the plot twists and turns this way and that in an effort to get to the finish line. The final sequence is hilarious and enjoyably inventive and yet, working as its own short film, it feels like it belongs in another narrative entirely.

Song Kang-ho is fine as Sang-hyeon although he’s always slightly remote which makes it difficult to connect with the priest’s plight. Kim Ok-bin is screamingly good as the scheming Tae-ju and her transformation from dowdy wife to murderous mistress is a cornerstone of the film. Shin Ha-kyun is a disappointment, hamstrung by a one-note characterisation which he never manages to escape, although Park Chan-wook regular Oh Dal-su has some fun in a cameo.

I don’t want to be too harsh on “Thirst” but, for all its merits, it is symptomatic of a slide in the coherence of Park Chan-wook’s oeuvre that began with “Sympathy For Lady Vengeance”, a film which started out as a simple revenge tale and mushroomed into a treatise on moral relativism. And cake making. Even “Oldboy”, for all its bravura and excess, was a freight train which came close to coming off the rails more than once and yet was always clung on to make it all the way down the line.

However, to compare “Thirst” to Park Chan-wook’s earlier works is an illustration of how the proliferation of good ideas can get in the way of a focused film. “Sympathy For Mr Vengeance”, for all its bleakness, is a masterclass of composed filmmaking: a tale of essentially good people making the wrong decisions for the right reasons and inviting very bad consequences, Park Chan-wook marshalling all the filmic elements like the pieces on a chess board to draw the audience inexorably to the breathtaking climax.

Bottom Line

"Thirst" is certainly not a bad film. And even a misfiring Park Chan-wook film is still more interesting than 90% of modern movies, be they labelled 'horror' or not. Let's hope that another "JSA" is on the cards for Park Chan-wook's next outing.