Thirst

In my personal opinion, Chan-wook Park films are wildly inconsistent. Some (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) are excellent, others (Lady Vengeance) are just weird and boring. Thirst is somewhere in between. I'd been curious about it for awhile, and I've been reading a lot of vampire fiction lately, and bemoaning my inability to see foreign films in theatres, so it seemed like an appropriate choice. Verdict? I'm really not sure. Not especially recommended? I don't quite know what to make of it. It doesn't really seem to know what to make of itself, to be honest. The movie starts off as a vampire film, a priest accidentally becomes a vampire, goes around carefully sucking blood without killing people, etc, then the film becomes a seriously weird love story/family drama as he meets a young woman, her idiot husband, and his drunken mother. He falls in love with her, they develop a passionate relationship (the sex scenes are... unusual. Kind of hot, kind of weird. Nothing really shocking, just kind of strange.). From there, it takes a turn for the really bizarre. I don't want to give it away, though honestly, it really does seem quite random to me, and like the movie is actually 3 different narrative tropes crammed into one. Also, there are these interpellated flashes of scenes that I really didn't understand - did they actually happen? What were they doing there?

Despite the plot being borderline nonsensical (yet strangely cliche), and not all that interesting, and most of the characters being kind of terrifyingly inhuman, there are quite a few oddly poignant moments in the film. Certain moments of human interaction just seem so wonderfully captured. And some of the more jarringly strange and extreme facial expressions or gestures do have a weird artistic resonance that's somehow striking. Visually, it's often quite beautiful (as Park's movies tend to be), though the gore in this case occasionally feels more campy than elegant. Overall though - yeah, I couldn't really make sense of it. And I was kind of bored.