Review: Vampire Romance Thirst Would Eat Twilight Alive

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook brings emotion and terror to a bloodsucker tale that would make Robert Pattinson fans wet their pants

Review in a Hurry: Boy meets girl, passion ensues, girl introduces boy to obnoxious in-laws, girl demands too much from boy, boy tries to rekindle spark, things just go wrong...but there's a twist: He's an ex-priest who's become a vampire following a blood transfusion to cure him of an Ebola-like disease. And yet Thirst is somehow the most emotionally honest relationship movie of the year.

The Bigger Picture: What did you expect from the director of Oldboy—a happy family movie? Park Chan-wook doesn't play like that. In a vampire love story that'll make Twilight fans wet their pants in terror before traumatizing them for life, Park holds nothing back, and neither do his characters. It's mind-blowing that the movie managed to get an R-rating—all the subtitles must have distracted the MPAA.

Guilt-ridden Catholic priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho, The Host), who's the type of guy to beat himself repeatedly about the legs every time he has lustful thoughts, volunteers to be infected with a deadly, lesion-inducing, blood-puking disease in order to become a test subject for the experimental cure. Initially, the virus seems to kill him, but he revives on the operating table...the cure has worked, but there are side-effects. Like the fact that his skin catches fire in the sunlight, or that the lesions and vomiting return unless he can suck some fresh blood on a regular basis.

Nonetheless, his return from death is spun as a miracle, and he becomes much in demand to heal the sick. When he seemingly brings back a childhood friend from death's door by praying for him, the friend's wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin) becomes smitten. She, too, wants to be a vampire, but unlike Sang-hyun, she has no moral qualms about it. His, however, are being overtaken by base desires. Since he has already given in to the desire to drain the blood from hospital IV tubes, why not give in to more? So he does, but the initial lust phase of a relationship is hard to sustain when the other partner turns out to be completely nuts.

Movie relationships, especially the romanticized kind often featured in vampire tales, rarely get down to the nitty-gritty quite like Thirst. Like other movies, it acknowledges the joys of sex with a beautiful woman, but then shows that that alone isn't enough, and the baggage both people bring will catch up with them eventually. But it's not all deep stuff—there's killing, and flying, and burning, and even a waterlogged zombie! Plus the novel concept that vampires would prefer brightly lit white rooms to darkness, since they cannot enjoy natural daylight any more.

The 180—a Second Opinion: This is a long movie, and it takes a while to get going; the early stages are a bit of a visually uninteresting slog that you have to bear with (and retroactively appreciate) in order to get to the guts of the tale.