It’s a big world of horror cinema out there and I think it’s always interesting to explore work from different regions. Not only can you find a variety of new stories or folkloric sources, but you can often find new approaches to tone, to styles of acting. Having seen at least a few examples of his work, I find Park Chan-Wook’s handling of tone quite fascinating. Comedy, brutality, sentiment, and naturalism co-inhabit his films in a way that, were they from Hollywood, I would criticize, but in his hands, they seem to heighten each other and really serve the work. This is just such a film.
Thirst (2009)
This South Korean vampire feature from Park Chan-Wook (director of Oldboy, Stoker, and The Handmaiden, among many others) feels surprisingly fresh. It hits many common tropes of the vampire tale, but consistently strikes a unique inflection—at once, teeming with life, often hilarious, and also quite grounded and corporeal. While being stylish and nice to look at, it is not particularly stylistic or atmospheric. However, the film comes to life in its scene work—in character interactions and the genuine relish with which the characters and the film experience each moment.
Based on Émile Zola’s 1868 naturalist novel, Thérèse Raquin, the story follows a priest, Sang-hyun (Kang-ho Song, recently of Parasite) who feels dissatisfied with the degree to which he is actually anyone helping through his work. He chooses to take part in a vaccine trial for the deadly leprosy-eque Emmanuel Virus, which he is not expected to survive. And he doesn’t. But, perhaps thanks to a blood transfusion from an unknown and never disclosed source, he happens to become a vampire and comes back to life, though still with the virus, the symptoms of which only ease up when he feeds. (None of this, surprisingly, was in the Zola text)
Sang-hyun’s resurrection is heralded as miraculous and the terminally ill flock to him, seeking his blessing. One such supplicant is Lady Ra (Kim Hae-sook), the mother of Sang-hyun’s permanently sickly childhood friend, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). Having prayed for him, Kang-woo’s cancer apparently disappears and Sang-hyun is invited round for dinner where he meets another childhood friend, all grown up, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), Kang-woo’s miserable wife.
Tae-ju had been taken in by Lady Ra as a child and brought up as her daughter/servant, before coming of age and being married to the endlessly sniffling, shivering, dripping, and infuriatingly, if moderately goofily endearingly, dependent Kang-woo, thus shifting from daughter/servant to daughter-in-law/caretaker. There is an immediate attraction between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju and it isn’t long before, Sang-hyun feeling a bit freed from his priestly vows by the whole vampirism thing, they begin a passionate affair, eventually murdering Kang-woo (as Tae-ju gives Sang-hyun the false impression that Kang-woo beats her), and eventually turning Tae-ju into a vampire.
As is often the case, as our original vampire protagonist is quite careful and conservative in how he feeds, never having killed anyone who was unwilling before Kang-woo, his progeny is wild and kills with abandon. Having lived so long under the thumb of another, Tae-ju embraces her newfound power and makes a bit of a mess (you just know when someone paints every surface in their home white that sooner-or-later, there will be blood).
This leads to inevitable conflict between them, culminating in Sang-hyun driving the two of them to fields atop a barren cliff where there is nowhere to hide from the coming sunrise. Tae-ju initially fights to live, but in the end, acquiesces and they sit on the hood of the car to watch the sun come up before turning to ash.
But again, the plot, while there are some nice turns along the way, is largely what one expects from a vampire story. But that really doesn’t detract (much) from the joys of the movie. The first thing that sets it apart is its aforementioned tone. I suppose it might not be classified as a comedy, but it is persistently very funny. Much of that exists in small moments, a reaction shot here, a snide comment there, but it can also fill larger set pieces. After Kang-woo’s murder, both Sang-hyun and Tae-ju are initially haunted by what they’ve done and for a time, they lose the vigor in their relationship. This is largely down to the fact that both keep hallucinating the drowned Kang-woo (in all his drippy, snotty, idiot grin glory), especially whenever they try to have sex and he lies, clammy and dribbling between them. This kills the mood, somewhat.
Another tonal element centers on the pure joy of new power. There is a stretch that could have come from any super-hero film when Tae-ju first learns what Sang-hyun has become and gets him to show off for her (in a sequence that suggests the first time Superman takes Lois for a flight in the 1978 film). It’s telling that she is the one who is excited by it. He hadn’t really thought to explore the extent of his new abilities, but she is thrilled to have him leap from tall buildings or bend coins to demonstrate his strength. Of course, when she has turned, this excitement continues.
And then there is the Zola based kitchen sink melodrama of it all: two people succumbing to desire, their thirst if you will, going down a rabbit hole of murder, co-dependence, recrimination, and depravity, ending in somewhat mutual suicide. The oddest juxtaposition in the film is really not between this mid-19th century narrative and the tale of a vampire priest in South Korea. Rather, it is between the weight of the original subject matter, the crushing downfall of two broken degenerates, and the light touch of the filmmaker as we follow two characters who are both very likable in their ways: our melancholic protagonist who is genuinely trying to do good in his (un)life, or at least to minimize harm, and his more sanguine paramour whose greedy lapping up of every pleasure is quite infectious.
In his preface to Thérèse Raquin, Zola wrote that his intention was “to study temperaments and not characters” and apparently (I’m going from Wikipedia here—I haven’t read it) this resulted in a cold, clinical presentation of the story which influenced the early naturalist literary movement. Here, those temperaments survive, but Park Chan-Wook really gives us characters to accompany them: sometimes ridiculous, sometimes tender and shy, sometimes thoughtful, and sometimes unable to control themselves, though they sometimes want to. It is anything but cold.
Sang-hyun goes on a significant journey over the course of the film. At the beginning, he is lost. Unfulfilled in his role as a priest, he takes his life in his hands, volunteering for the trial vaccine. He in unable to, in any way, live for himself. By the end of the movie, he becomes a kind of leper, a monster, an adulterer, a murderer, an abuser, by all counts, a sinner, but he also becomes someone who can genuinely smile.
Right before driving to the cliffs at the end, he stops the car by the camp of people outside his monastery who now worship him as a miracle worker. There, he gets intentionally caught with his pants down, looking like he was attempting to rape one of his faithful. They turn against him, throwing rocks, chasing him away. As he flees, his elation is clear. He is free from their love and expectations. And they are free of their devotion. He can live his own life and choose his own death.
For a movie that features a nice old blind priest being stabbed in the heart, blood being vomited through the holes of a recorder, leprous boils and pustules, self-flagellation, liters of mucous, and a prodigious quantity of peeled off fingernails, the total effect is honestly surprisingly light and uplifting without being at all glib or parodic. It’s quite a piece of work.