If you wanted to give your life meaning, would you be capable of donating your body to science so they could experiment on you and help others? I suppose I’m not the best of people. Sang-hyun doesn’t come out looking great either. This priest has broken his vows, but he still wears the clerical collar to talk with a God who barely stops him from hiding that almost erotic desire to drain sinners or the terminally ill down to the last drop. Or whoever reaches the vein first — but please, if we start getting moralistic, we’ll starve to death.
In Thirst they have existentialist problems: the kind that keep you from going out for cigarettes and never coming back. I’ve even caught myself in that strange dilemma stepping out of the subway, though it only proves that quenching a thirst for human blood won’t fix anything in my life. That’s what Sang-hyun’s companion, Tae-ju, is for. She is fed up; she hates her husband and her mother-in-law, and she lives fantasizing about their deaths. But the interesting part of their relationship is how they both wreck their lives waiting for a final judgment that turns out almost romantic, toxic, and devastating. She is the real star of the film: a neophyte who has lost every human scruple and wants only to be a refined hedonist vampire. I could perfectly well want to be her — and here we are, writing a review at four in the morning because I have no schedule, and no date on the calendar.
The vampirism project Park Chan-wook joined should have had more resonance in cinema, because it glorifies an aspect of “bloodsuckers” that hadn’t been used in a long time: the pleasure of being dead. We don’t need Sang-hyuns; we need Tae-jus, with an enviable lack of guilt that borders on sociopathy. Seriously, we’re tired of feeling guilty about everything. Let us pray for the charitable priest who is, in fact, repressing his urge to eat half the population. And if you’re really looking for a reason to stay up late, give Thirst a chance — it will give you new reasons to love Korean cinema.
In Thirst they have existentialist problems: the kind that keep you from going out for cigarettes and never coming back. I’ve even caught myself in that strange dilemma stepping out of the subway, though it only proves that quenching a thirst for human blood won’t fix anything in my life. That’s what Sang-hyun’s companion, Tae-ju, is for. She is fed up; she hates her husband and her mother-in-law, and she lives fantasizing about their deaths. But the interesting part of their relationship is how they both wreck their lives waiting for a final judgment that turns out almost romantic, toxic, and devastating. She is the real star of the film: a neophyte who has lost every human scruple and wants only to be a refined hedonist vampire. I could perfectly well want to be her — and here we are, writing a review at four in the morning because I have no schedule, and no date on the calendar.
The vampirism project Park Chan-wook joined should have had more resonance in cinema, because it glorifies an aspect of “bloodsuckers” that hadn’t been used in a long time: the pleasure of being dead. We don’t need Sang-hyuns; we need Tae-jus, with an enviable lack of guilt that borders on sociopathy. Seriously, we’re tired of feeling guilty about everything. Let us pray for the charitable priest who is, in fact, repressing his urge to eat half the population. And if you’re really looking for a reason to stay up late, give Thirst a chance — it will give you new reasons to love Korean cinema.
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