Streaming Availability: Peacock
(Small note: Park Chan-wook has a new mystery thriller movie in theaters right now called Decision to Leave, it's really great. Check it out if you can.)
We are going to conclude Spooky Month with a double feature
of vampire romances. One was made by one of our
greatest living directors, a master of the modern twisty sex thriller, and thus was immensely acclaimed. The other is Twilight. I do not need to further qualify
Twilight, that name tons of weighty baggage in your mind already. Somehow
despite having very different ideas on vampires, having opposite views on eroticism,
and being made on opposite sides of the Pacific, they both have the “Hold on
tight, spider monkey” scene. For some reason, all of us, YA or not, just wanted
a gravity-defying vampire to carry us through the air in the late 2000s.
Putting Twilight away, the movie I was most reminded of
while watching Thirst was Ganja & Hess, a movie I covered three weeks ago.
Park Chan-wook and Bill Gunn have extremely
different concerns and styles. There is almost nothing similar between a South
Korean director in 2009 and an experimental Black filmmaker in 1972. I have no
reason to believe Ganja & Hess was an influence on Thirst, though these two plots rhyme in remarkable way. They both find an African origin to
their vampire. They’re both capital-A ‘Adult’ takes on Nosferatus, too serious to let their monsters have silly fangs. Both films treat the undead as a tool through
which they attack themes of sexuality, addiction, and faith. They’re even both doomed
romances where a vampire man murders a friend, and turns his lusty wife into an
insatiable creature of the night.
Thirst is over two hours long but even for that running time has a ton of plot. It is at times horror, at times a twisty thriller, at times melodrama. There’s a lot of movie in this movie. It is partially an adaptation of an 1868 Emile Zola novel, Thérèse Raquin (which I have not read), which has nothing to do with vampires. Park Chan-wook adds a Catholic vampire superstructure on top of that tragic romance plot.
Despite the complexity,
Thirst is a linear, lucid experience, until guilt and fear overtake the
characters in the middle of the film and things become increasingly hallucinatory. A lot of visions of a drowned man suddenly, which then disappear. We go back to pure realism.
There are two, maybe even three distinct dramatic climaxes. The central love
triangle ends in a watery end, with the two survivors then coming to their own bloody
conclusion. However, Thirst continues on for an extra act, to finally end not in water or blood, but flame.
Father Sang-hyun
(Song Kang-ho, who is almost unrecognizable due to how little comedy this role asks of him) is a disillusioned priest working his ministry in a
South Korean hospital. He hopes for a greater contribution, so volunteers for a
near-suicidal drug trial in Africa to find a cure for a local disease, the
Emmanuel Virus. EV is considered fatal, causing hideous blistering on the hands
and face, until it targets the organs, resulting in nasty body horror, puking
buckets of blood. None of the fifty volunteers survive, including Sang-hyun,
who is pronounced dead on the table. Until, suddenly, a final blood infusion brings him back to life. He’s thought to be a miracle, maybe even a saint, his legend
grows to being the “one in 500” with holy disease curing powers. What his cult does not
know is that Sang-hyun has actually become a vampire, and needs blood to hold off the next
round of blistering, the boils returning to his face over and over through the film.
Sang-hyun reconnects with his friend,
Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), the child-like son of Mrs. Ra (Kim Hae-sook).
Mrs. Ra has fixed things up for her worthless son by giving him her adopted daughter, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin). Tae-ju is treated as little more
than a Cinderella mixed with a sex slave, having been married to Kang-woo, and
serving her "mother" in their dress shop. Sang-hyun’s new monstrous form starts
to awaken his hungers that he had repressed in the service of God, so soon
enough, he is having an affair with Tae-ju. And from there, murder plots
abound.
You cannot discuss Thirst without discussing its centerpiece
sex scene, so let’s go. Sex scenes are controversial, there’s always some
#discourse happening on Film Twitter. People are mad about there being too many, whether there’s
not enough, whether its porn, exploitation, art, whatever - it is all exhausting.
Thirst should settle that argument entirely as far as I am concerned. The first full sex scene between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju unleashes feelings in both of them neither have ever experienced. This is extraordinary filmmaking
of intense intimacy the highlight of the movie. It is also something that is important in the lives of adults, and their relationship, as an audience we need to understand this pleasure and what it means for Kang-woo and Tae-ju (who is into a few bites to the shoulder).
Between Thirst and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook is a master of cinema
eroticism.
Another conflict here is that of faith. It is interesting that Park Chan-wook is a lapsed Catholic, considering his two leads here are a vampire priest and a woman with no faith at all. Sang-hyun in the story grows increasing detached from God, and increasingly drawn into the plots of his atheist lover. The power of the spiritual is feeble in Thirst, to the point I'm not God exists in this film. That's a rarity for vampire fiction, where crosses and holy water are usually powerful tools. Not here.
The other issue is that while physical pleasure is liberating, it is merely fulfilling an urge, like that
of sucking blood. Sang-hyun is trying hard to not hurt anybody, to acquire
blood secretly and safely. But all his inhibitions are broken by Tae-ju, who
leads him down a murderous path. First, they drown Kang-woo, then they’re
feeding on innocent people. However, he has not replaced the meaning he had or desired with anything. Worse, Tae-ju is very much not the young woman she appeared to be. She was not in need of a savior in God or a man.
Tae-ju, once transformed herself into a vampire, has no
philosophical concerns. She sees herself as a predator, the humans around
her as prey. She does continue to care for Mrs. Ra, who becomes an invalid after
suffering a stroke from grief. But otherwise, she is liberated from all illusion and all fictions of morality. When we first
meet Tae-ju, she wanders her town barefoot, maybe playing up her fairy tale
entrapment. By the end of the film, when red blood is smeared all over her pearl white skin, she acquires a taste for high heels.
While Sang-hyun and Tae-ju work out their issues, a lot of people
around them are going to die horribly.
Thirst might just be the single best vampire film of the current
century. The only real competition I would give it is Let the Right One In, the
2008 Swedish film. (I covered it lastyear, in fact.) These are both beautiful movies with a cold, measured tone, they’re
not thrills-a-minute crowd pleasers. You will not find many jump scares or quips
here. Yet all that patience is rewarded when they open up to horrible scenes of
graphic violence and incredible acting and gorgeous cinematography. Thirst is as good as any other movie we've covered this month... which does make me sad that we are coming to the end.
Next Time! The grand finale. I promised at the beginning we
were going from Bela Lugosi to Bella Swan. At last,
Twilight.
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