After his terminally quirky “romantic comedy” I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK failed to impress the handful of people who saw it, the notion of Chan-Wook Park returning to the ultra-nihilism of his legendary Vengeance Trilogy would not have been too surprising. With Thirst, he attempts to integrate the offbeat romantic elements of his previous failure with the operatic, pulpy universes of Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. He also integrates a heavy religious angle that leads to Father Sang-hyeon, our man of faith (Song Kang-Ho) traveling to Africa, exposing himself to a nasty virus as part of an experiment to find a vaccine, promptly falling ill (after puking blood into his bamboo recorder), then receiving a blood transfusion which “kills” him before mysteriously resurrecting him. Standard Christ allegory, no doubt, but that’s just the initial thread of this unholy tangled mess of a plot.

Once the priest begins to roam South Korea as “the Bandaged Saint”, gathering a faithful fellowship and performing magic shows at birthday parties (an unexplained detail), he is approached by a hysterical old lady, who beseeches him to come pray for Kang-woo, her cancer-ridden idiot son.

Since Kang-woo’s an old grade school chum, a quick jaunt to the hospital for a sacrament or two is the least Sang-hyeon can do. The last thing this halfway zombified, blister-covered priest wants is to fall head over heels for the fetching young bride of his moronic buddy, but this is precisely what happens after he’s invited to play mahjong with the dysfunctional Ra clan. At first, the comely Tae-joo doesn’t want anything to do with The Bandaged Saint; after a fateful night visit to the coma ward, the priest’s previously suppressed mojo bursts out with a vengeance that would make the villain of Oldboy cringe, then paradoxically salivate. When the man of faith finds that he likes to slurp blood from comatose humans through IV tubes, he’s at first horrified, a bit bummed at the expected aversion to sunlight, yet later delighted to find his eternal yen for exsanguination yields unexpected rewards. Superhuman strength, for one, not to mention the ability to leap great distances or the capacity to withstand severe trauma to the corpus without the usual fatal side effects. Best of all, those disgusting blisters retract, noisily and disgustingly, into a now ever so youthful visage. Which would also lead this Man of God down a path that involves the breaking of many commandments. But first, there’s a certain tile game that must be played on a weekly basis.

Back to the fateful night, that first encounter with his neighbor’s wife, that first planting of the evil seed, that first epic game of mahjong. If I’m a Cyborg was bound together with lengthy, CGI-intensive hallucinations, the weekly mahjong games are the glue that binds the disparate acts of Thirst into a more or less cohesive whole. A few days after the game, there are a couple of weird Meet Cutes in the street before a touching after-hours encounter in the Ra family’s dress shop cements the eternal bond between the Father and the youthful, devious, sadomasochistic Tae-joo. Okay, so it’s a borderline exploitive, lengthy foreplay that’s nothing more than a tease for the eventual unrestrained fuck-fest in an unoccupied hospital gurney, beside a coma patient who’s being harvested for sustenance. There is a sustained tone of dark, cold, icky humor that complements the surprisingly strong eroticism and, later, the gruesome twists and turns that come standard in Park’s milieu of heightened realism. The icy, matter-of-fact detachment from the increasingly ridiculous events gives them a weird sort of validity, but then the disturbingly realistic scenes hit you that much harder. That’s part of what makes Thirst work in fits and starts, and also one of its most glaring flaws. Tonal shizophrenia is an ailment that can’t be cured by mahjong and gorgeous 2.35:1 photography, no matter how gutsy your actors are.

Park reuses a lot of supporting character actors from previous ventures. Shin Ha-kyun, playing the dimwit son with the same conviction he gave the equally unlikable deaf-mute kidnapper in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance becomes an object we despise as much as we pity. He’s clearly a product of his clingy, shrill, ever-attentive mother, the shrewish Lady Ra, who does us the favor of going comatose after a certain point and communicating only in blinks. It is also during this third act contortion where Thirst begins to grow fangs and overcome its initial reluctance to develop much of  a compelling plot, outside of its uninhibited vampiric lust. Song Kang-ho plays his priest close to the chest, as stoic and low-key as possible. He manages to remain noble, even as he’s gulping down coma patient blood stored in a Tupperware tumbler. His particular crisis of faith doesn’t have much of a ring of truth to it. Of course a man of the cloth is gonna throw that cloth away once his disabled church superior whips out a pocketknife, opens up his own wrist, and commands that he drink from the fountain. Sure, he drinks; what self-respecting vampire wouldn’t?

Perhaps he isn’t so self-respecting, becoming more and more withdrawn as he plods (at times, dramatically leaps) down the path of sin, the foul road paved with flesh, leading to an inevitable fiery conclusion. So of course he complies with the girl’s request for vampirization. One good turn deserves another, or in this case leads to several grisly deaths, several gallons of blood and several corpses in the bathtub.

As the alluring, mercurial Tae-joo overcomes her priest-despoiling fetish, discovers her latent bloodlust, then proceeds to manipulate her lover into committing a gruesome murder, her character’s arc is consistently surprising and engaging, if not entirely believable. Kim Ok-vin does a great job with the role, managing to hit all the high notes for a character who is, as written, nothing if not a series of high notes branching off in unexpected directions. One moment she’s coy, giggling and innocently sexy, then in the blink of an eye she’s jamming a pair of podiatric clippers into an innocent man’s throat, gulping down the spurting gore while looking as cold, detached, and downright crazy as Catherine Deneuve at the end of Repulsion. Her character serves quite a few purposes for the screenplay, being an antagonist, a love interest, a hopeful object of salvation/redemption. This doesn’t happen until the third act, which starts with the worst mahjong night ever, involves a long sequence of brutal fisticuffs for control of a car trunk lid, and terminates with one of the most poetic, tragic endings ever.

Thirst is a weird movie that meanders for far too long, goes down a couple of blind alleys, but comes up with a fantastic finish in spite of the difficulty and looks damn good doing it. Seeing Park deconstruct a very well-worn genre is satisfying on a pure surface level; for all its obvious intent, Thirst can’t grasp any deeper meaning long enough to extract anything of use. A subplot about a cult revolving around The Bandaged Saint could have been excised without the story suffering a jot. Same with the hallucinations on Kang-woo’s waterbed. All strange, good stuff, but it’s all fat. Fans of this particular director will find plenty to slurp up, and might even ask for seconds.

Tags: bakjwi, chan-wook park, mahjong, song kang-ho, thirst

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