Thirst

Park Chan-wook is a subtle filmmaker, and I think Thirst is where he finally settles down into his groove. I’ve liked and loved everything since his career (really) started with Joint Security Area, but there’s been a level of bombast in style and searching for a rhythm from film to film. Thirst, I think, is where Park embraced what he wanted to do as a filmmaker in its first, fullest form. It’s a combination of genre thrills, quiet contemplation, darkly black humor, and precise visual framing that we’ve seen from him before but seem more purposefully and intentionally composed than, say, the more frantic energy in something like Oldboy.

Father Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a Catholic priest who wants to take part in a dangerous experiment that would see him exposed to a terrible disease, the Emmanuel Virus, in the hopes of finding a cure. Despite the protestations of his superiors, he goes, gets infected, receives a transfusion that happens to include vampire pathogens, and he’s saved from EV. The vampire in him keeps him alive, but he’s visually scarred by the boils of the disease unless…he drinks blood. The rules of vampires here are quickly laid out without dialogue. We see his boils vanish after drinking blood. He gets scarred by sunlight. He expressed disgust at the smell of garlic. He never grows fangs. It’s essentially standard vampire lore without the fangs, and Park doesn’t waste much time laying it out. Just quick details shown mostly visually and then moving on. It’s effectively laying out the rules without a mess, and it’s a highlight in how Park makes his movies. Clean, sumptuous visuals outlining rules and establishing character.

The center is obviously Father Sang-hyun, but there’s more. Father Sang-hyun becomes the center of a small religious fervor being called the Bandaged Saint. One of the people who comes to him looking for a miracle is Mrs. Ra (Kim Hae-sook), the mother to cancer-ridden Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) who is married to the pretty Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin). Through Tae-ju and with Father Sang-hyun’s now need for human blood to keep himself healthy, he increasing distances himself from his religious background (visually represented by the character shedding bits of the cloth at a time, starting with the Roman collar). Tae-ju ends up being a temptress, using Father Sang-hyun’s combination of moral center and need for blood to kill Kang-woo, pulling the priest further away from his faith with a combination of sex and violence.

And that gets handled in clean, objective filmmaking with longer shots that then allow for the dark comedy. Take the murder scene of Kang-woo. Done in a boat in the middle of a lake at night, the priest, unfamiliar with murder or balancing in a boat, has to deal with his own balance issues and unfamiliarity with the act of killing man creating a comedy of errors as things go wrong before they can go relatively right.

What I think ends up really making the film is that Father Sang-hyun’s moral center never really goes away, and the contrast that develops between the priest’s resistance to outright murder and Tae-ju’s feeling of being free to cause as much pain and suffering on the family that she feels has wronged her actually deepens the material from just the thrills of vampire action to an actual character piece. The final big showcase, where Tae-ju just lets loose on a small group of family friends while Father Sang-hyun goes from passively letting things happening to working out how to extricate himself from the situation and stop Tae-ju is a subtle piece of filmmaking. It relies heavily on Song as a performer to move from one room to the next, just doing small things to try and find a way to save someone, anyone in the situation. There’s no dialogue from him about the morality of the situation. We can just see it in his eyes, so that when he decides to make a final saving act, we don’t need an explanation.

And, again, it becomes a showcase for Park’s dark comedy as Tae-ju tries to extricate herself from certain doom with violence that Park’s body quickly heals, a back and forth that no one can really win. And it becomes surprisingly touching, watching a once holy man accept his fate after having succumbed to sin.

Park was raised Catholic but became agnostic over the years, so in his adaptation of Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin, changing the character of Laurent to a Catholic priest who wrestles with faith as the center of the film feels like an interesting insight into Park as a man. He’s a man who moved away from faith, like Father Sung-hyun, but Father Sung-hyun finds the secular and materialist existence ultimately too much for his soul to bear. Does that reflect a struggle on Park’s part?

Well, I have no idea. It very easily could just be he thought it was an interesting twist, stemming from his Catholic background, and he’s actually a very happy man all told. I dunno. I’ve never met the man.

Still, it paints an interesting portrait of the holy going secular and finding it empty, and I think that’s what I end up gravitating towards most in the film. A film with a moral question at its centered, manifested by a character, who has to go through darkly comic events in a genre setting with excellently composed shots from beginning to end? Yes, this is why I love Park Chan-wook so much.

Rating: 3.5/4