Kim Ok-vin in Thirst


Review by Tony Martins

Thirst, Mayfair Theatre, October 16-18, 21-22
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Korean with English subtitles


Ironically, most vampire fare these days suffers from a dearth of life-and-death urgency.

In everything from the seminal Buffy to recent hits Twilight and the HBO series True Blood (to which I'm admittedly addicted), the biting and the sucking and the dying and the walking around dead are made more palatable for younger audiences with safe, whimsical storylines and too many vampire in-jokes.

As a dude who essentially lost his virginity to Bram Stoker (in particular the scene where Jonathan Harker tangos with the trio of vampiresses) and was scared white when reading Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the early Anne Rice novels, I know hard-core vampire action when I see it. And these days I rarely see it.

But I saw it in Thirst, the Korean-made film showing this week and next at the ever-courageous Mayfair Theatre. The film won the Prix du Jury [Jury Prize] at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival.

Co-written and directed by Park Chan-wook, Thirst is essentially a love story, featuring a golden-hearted Catholic priest Sang-hyun (played by Song Kang-ho) who becomes a vampire out of goodwill, murders out of goodwill, and commits the ultimate sin once again out of goodwill.

Determined to save people, Sang-hyun volunteers for an experiment seeking an antidote to a new virus that kills white and Asian men only. He alone survives the trial but soon learns that he must drink human blood to avoid lethal recurrences of the disease.

Torn by his obvious moral and professional quandary, Sang-hyun initially survives by siphoning the blood of a coma victim, but when he encounters the desperate and seductive Tae-ju (played by Kim Ok-vin) he makes her a vampire to save her and all hell breaks loose.

Everything is raw in Thirst: the rough sex, the bloodspilling, the violence, the betrayal, the fitting end to the brief vampiric rampage. The film conjures the supernatural, but the characters remain thoroughly human, even when undead.

Interestingly, unlike all the tame vampire stories currently out there, Thirst is 100% fang free. The vampires can fly, are super strong, must drink human blood and avoid sunlight, but strangely there are no long and pointy canines.

This dental detail becomes trivial, however, because Thirst delivers what is largely missing from vampire tales these days: real characters with real fears facing real consequences. (Another exception to this trend: the Swedish-made Let the Right One In, which also screened this year at the Mayfair.)

Thirst revives the tantalizing essence of vampire lore by forgoing the teen angst and focussing on red-blooded adult passions. My thirst for something worthy of Stoker has been temporarily quenched.