Review: MIFF09 review: THIRST (dir. Park Chan-wook)
With Thirst, Park Chan-wook, best known for the excellent Vengeance Trilogy of the past few years (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) takes a welcome step into full on Grand Guignol horror melodrama; only it takes him a bit too long to get there. Park’s best films, particularly Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, are models of dramatic construction; beginning with a simple set-up that slowly, inexorably, spirals down into violence. You come out feeling like you’ve been put through the wringer, and thinking that Park may be a modern master of tragedy. Thirst, on the other hand, fumbles around for its first half, never quite finding its footing, and while it’s never anything less than interesting, you can almost feel it relax in relief when it finally gets its ducks in a row.
The film follows an aimless priest, Sang-hyeon, who volunteers for medical experimentation to help cure the illness that threatens his flock. Just as the deadly, and grotesque, disease is about to kill him, a last minute blood transfusion saves him, and begins to effect strange transformations. Park wisely gets all this vampire business out of the way pretty quickly (it isn’t long before Sang-hyeon is sucking blood out of a comatose patient’s hospital tubes) and moves on to the priest’s desperate, carnal affair with the battered wife of a childhood friend. Here the film becomes a free adaptation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (wikipedia this if you want to spoil the film’s first half), before a not entirely unpredictable narrative turns propels the film into its immensely satisfying conclusion.
Thankfully, even when the film is fumbling around, the two leads, Song Kang-so as Sang-hyeon and Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju (the wife), keep it engaging. Song (seen also in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Memories of Murder, as well as Park’s Mr Vengeance) seems to be the most effortlessly expressive, and quietly chameleonic, actor working anywhere today. He’s so good you could watch him reading the phonebook quietly to himself. And Kim, whom I don’t believe I’ve seen elsewhere, is incredible; it’s not a coincidence that the film is at its best when she is allowed to dominate. With Tae-ju (weak; naïve; duplicitous; steely; crazy; sexy; totally awesome) she creates my favourite monstrous feminine in a festival that seems unusually full of them (see also, Antichrist).
While even the second half cannot satisfactorily tie up Thirst’s myriad narrative, thematic, and tonal loose ends, when it is at its best (as with a relentlessly violent climatic sequence at the couple’s apartment), the film is fabulously sick fun.
