the blog of nathan loding

Bakjwi (Thirst) (2009)
Star­ring: Kang-ho Song, Ok-bin Kim
Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Writ­ten by: Seo-Gyeong Jeong and Chan-wook Park, inspired by “Thérèse Raquin” by Émile Zola
Rated: R
Rat­ing: 4 (out of five)

With the teenage vam­pire craze under way it’s hard to find a good vam­pire movie any more.  (Although I’m not really cer­tain I can blame Stephanie Meyer for it, good vam­pire movies were hard to come by before.)  This is one that makes a valiant, orig­i­nal attempt at reclaim­ing the genre.

Chan-wook Park is best known for Old Boy, the vio­lent revenge yarn about a man who has been help cap­tive for years for no good rea­son.  His hor­ror movies are unique, just as Old Boy was unique for a revenge story.  There is an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive brought to them, and an inter­est­ing explo­ration of raw human nature.  Few other hor­ror films are as deep.

Thirst is about a Roman Catholic priest.  He works at a hos­pi­tal per­form­ing last rites to it’s dying ten­ants.  He’s a good, hum­ble, pious man, seek­ing to do good for his fel­low man in any way he can.  Blessed with a healthy body and not able to help beyond pray­ing, he vol­un­teers for a rad­i­cal med­ical exper­i­ment that is attempt­ing to cure a deadly virus.  It fails, and the priest dies.

Dur­ing the resus­ci­ta­tion attempt the dying priest is given a blood trans­fu­sion, and it’s blood from a vam­pire.  The priest is res­ur­rected in the morgue, becom­ing the first human to suc­cess­fully fight off the deadly dis­ease.  A cult fol­low­ing forms around him, peo­ple beg­ging him to heal them with­out real­iz­ing what he’s become.

The priest begins to strug­gle with his new afflic­tion – his new self – and still retain his pre­vi­ous moral code.  He leaves the sem­i­nary and the hos­pi­tal to find a new place in the world and begins spend­ing time with a child­hood friend of his, Kang-woo, and his young wife, Tae-ju.  The priest can’t hold back his car­nal needs, ampli­fied after his trans­for­ma­tion, for Tae-ju.  He strug­gles with these new actions and his pre­vi­ous vow of chastity; she, on the other hand, yearns to escape her bor­ing mar­riage and will­ing accepts the priest, vam­pirism and all, into her arms.  The urges become too much and both are soon entan­gled in a mess of blood, mur­der, revenge, and self-loathing.

An inter­est­ing idea of the vam­pire is that they do things out of need, not out of want.  The first half of the movie is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how some­one as pure as good priest would cope with becom­ing vam­pire.  The bud­ding love (or lust) between the priest and Tae-ju is equally fas­ci­nat­ing.  The film makes a point of plac­ing the vam­pire into a moral con­flict rather than a phys­i­cal one, fram­ing it within the real world.

Unfor­tu­nately, the film turns a lit­tle too grotesquely comedic in the mid­dle of the sec­ond half for it to have been a bril­liant pic­ture.  Any philo­soph­i­cal explo­ration was tossed aside for a bloody and graphic inter­lude.  It fits within the con­struct of the story, but los­ing that depth of char­ac­ter momen­tar­ily is enough to drag the movie down.

It’s taken a while for this movie to grow on me.  Had I writ­ten this review imme­di­ately after view­ing it, it would have been much more neg­a­tive and lower rated.  The movie has stuck with me and has planted some lin­ger­ing thoughts in my about the clas­sic vam­pire mythos.  To any­one I said “Don’t bother” to – I take it back!

–

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EbOyGAtcik