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Kim Ok-vin as Tae-ju and Song Kang-ho as Sang-Hyun in the bloody Korean vampire film, Thirst |
Vampire priest and holey necks
THIRST
Directed by Pan Chan-Wook
Certificate 18
A KOREAN vampire film with subtitles may not be the easiest thing to sell, despite a long and proud tradition of supernatural ghost stories from the country’s film-makers. However, within the opening moments, you will release you are about to be enveloped by a rather special and unique take on the vampire legend.
Sang-Hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a priest at a hospital who takes the deaths of patients extremely personally, as if their passing is an affront to his God. He feels powerless to do something and wishes to make a Christ-like sacrifice, so he volunteers to be a human guinea pig for a laboratory trying to develop a vaccine to beat a deadly, skin-boiling virus.
We learn that of 500 people on the course, 499 die – and Sang-Hyun, the sole survivor, has only done so because of a massive blood transfusion. But this is only the beginning of his problems – the blood he has been given has been infected by vampire genes!
Suddenly our priest is experiencing previously undiscovered lusts – the seven deadly sins bubble through his veins – and an unquenchable thirst for the claret.
It is only accentuated by the fact he is still working in a hospital, giving the last rites to car crash victims and sucking the blood from the lifeless body of a man in a coma. He has to do it. Not only is it his life force, but it helps him heal. Without regular pints, the disgusting boils of the disease he was hoping to help find a cure for begin to re-appear, meaning his own life is in peril.
Then his childhood friend Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin) comes to him and asks for help escaping the clutches of her vile family, where he goes once a week for a game of Majohng, a type of Asian dominoes. Suddenly he can’t help but sin. From here, the film takes on an air of the incredible, haunting Emile Zola book Thérèse Raquin.
In Raquin, we follow the adventures of the lady of the title, who lives under the thumb of a mother and her son at their down-at-heel haberdashers shop in a dingy Parisian back street. Thérèse has been looked after by the family from a young girl, then forced to marry her sickly adopted brother. She wants out, and falls in love with the lodger. They murder his rival.
Thirst follows a similar route. Tae-ju is also a prisoner to her adopted family who live above a tailors, and has been forced to marry her benefactors’ sickly, grotesque son. There is even an aside about her being bitten on the shoulder – the exact injury Thérèse’s lover suffers at the hands of her husband as he is drowned in the Seine.
This is truly like no vampire film you will ever have seen before: it is as wacky a horror as The Wicker Man, and full of superb, haunting, claustrophobic performances. There is humour, too. This is no coffin-sleeping vampire, although daylight burns the skin. He simply turns a wardrobe on its back and sleeps inside that instead.
It has been feted at various film festivals around the world and rightly so. It will send chills up the spine, has gloriously creepy characters, and a dollop of laughs that all good scarefests should have.
Above all, the characters are believable (not a bad achievement for such a fantastical idea). You’ll be rooting for our vampire long before the movie reaches its bloody climax. |
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