[7.1/10] *Thirst* is a thoroughly weird, consistently gross, incredibly sexualized film that is, nonetheless, surprisingly old-fashioned. It is the story of a devoted, self-flagellating priest and a cowed and cornered young woman, who suffer from different kinds of repression. And in the end, it kind of suggests that the worst thing to happen to them, and those around them, was letting them loose from that repression.

I don’t know if director and co-writer Park Chan-wook truly intends that moral. I take *Thirst* to be more a character study bathed in the idea of change over time. A closed-off man of the cloth becomes a hedonistic free spirit and eventually becomes a haunted penitent once more. A timid young woman finds her passions and becomes a reluctant and regretful accomplice, only to turn into a Lady MacBeth type and eventually a complete monster. Beyond any message, those transformations *are* the story.

They’re also the selling point. You feel the length of *Thirst* two hour and fifteen minute runtime. Several scenes drag, and the movie stretched on for at least one full act beyond what I was expecting given the rhythms of the story.

But the counterbalance to that is that there’s a sort of epicness to the personal journeys at the center of the film. Each step of Sang-hyun’s path from questioning religious man to repentant sinner has time for exploration, to where his multi-stage transition feels authentic and organic despite being steeped in so much of the fantastical. And in the same vein, Tae-ju’s own evolution, from the most retiring and put upon housewife you’ve ever met, to the most diabolical man-eating beast, is likewise convincing in a way you’d never expect.

The movie is a grind at times, but it makes space for its characters’ growth and corruption, which justifies the length in hindsight, even if it’s not always a party on a moment-to-moment basis.

Speaking of which, *Thirst* is, well, disgusting. I don’t mean that as a criticism. There is a sense in which the film is capital-r Romantic, but it is commendably and decidedly unromantic in its depiction of vampirism. Park’s take on vamps recalls Guillermo del Toro’s interpretation of them in [*Cronos*](https://trakt.tv/comments/256835), in the sense that the loss of one’s living body and the need to feed on human blood would give the average onlooker as much cause to recoil as to gush.

Everything from the pulsing neck wound of car crash victims, to the sores and pustules of those suffering from the film’s fictional virus, down to Sang-hyun licking all up in Tae-ju’s armpit in the throes of lovemaking makes your skin crawl. As is expected for a vampire movie, *Thirst* is utterly awash in blood, but rarely, if ever, in a fun or spirited way, almost always with a sense of creeping horror. This is not a pretty or clean film, and it’s not trying to be. Here, vampirism truly is a curse, a loss of humanity, and maybe of the soul, and that comes through as plainly in the willingness to disgust the audience with the trappings of the condition.

Despite the undercurrent of stomach-turning material in the movie, it is a wild ride tonally, as is often the case when you get away from the staid confines of western cinema. At times, it’s a larger-than-life fable. In other instances, it’s a gut-wrenchingly awkward and honest depiction of repressed people taking their first fumbling steps into self-actualization. Sometimes, it’s a veritable soap opera, with over-the-top twists and turns, often located in the same domestic setting. Sometimes it’s a dark comedy, with a bizarre *Tell-Tale Heart*-esque take on coitus and a blackly comic wit. And sometimes it’s simply an art film, with stylistic flourishes mixed with bold choices that you’d expect from something earning critical plaudits at Cannes.

There’s never one clear mood or mode to the picture, which works to its benefit in capturing the messiness of life in the whole and to its disadvantage when moving from scene to scene or chapter to chapter.

In both the tonal shifts and the longform character journeys, the two leads are the anchors who hold this wide-ranging, sometimes ungainly movie together. Song Kang-ho does strong work as the priest. He’s particularly good at conveying the conflict within the man, both the human being yearning to break free from the strictures of his limited world, and the kind soul striving to keep a grasp on his humanity even as his sinful desires take over more and more of his life.

But Kim Ok-bin steals the show as Tae-ju. Even in her mouse-like early guise, there’s the sense of a hidden self-possession, a realer individual peeking out from the edges of her performance. She too marries a sense of desire and reluctance, which eventually curdles into regret when things go too far. And once the gloves are off and the fangs are out, she is truly terrifying as a person who gives themselves over being a predator, with crazy eyes and malevolent smile that could make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. She has the most different notes to play, and somehow manages to turn them into a melody.

In the relationship between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju is a surfeit of codependency and mutual self-destruction worthy of being memorialized in a Mountain Goats song. (The unreleased track “Bride” is a good place to start, given the themes.) The way liberating interest turns into prurient sneaking around before it becomes a game of reciprocal cajoling and deceit and abuse, until, in the final tally, the violence and destructiveness between them is undeniable.

*Thirst* is, ultimately, a story of corruption, where you start out rooting for the penned in people at its center to break free of their shackles by any means necessary, and by the end you see what nightmares their freedom has wrought and wish they could be contained. There is an earnest ugliness to the film, a willingness not to flinch from the horrors of vampirism and the wages of sin, or the dark side of human existence and relationships, that fuels the film’s best moments.

And yet, in the end, it is also a blend of romance and tragedy. These people have become monsters. It is right that they burn up in the glare of the rising sun, a luminous final contrast to the dark hues Park paints his pictures in. But there is also something beautiful in these two people, their fates intertwined in freedom and in their fall, holding one another as the end takes hold. It is a long, rocky, and oft-bizarre road to get there, but the beauty of the ending makes the journey feel worth it.

It’s just strange, to the modern eye, to see a relatively modern film whose values seem to paint the liberation at the heart of Sang-hyun and Tae-ju’s journeys -- orphans broken out of religious and domestic strictures that made them both want to die, shedding their guilt and abuse to enjoy passion and sex and self-possession -- as something that ultimately leads to their downfall.

Vampires have often been a symbol of repressed sexuality and the sin and damnation that can follow from desire and anomie. You just don’t expect that in something this artful, modern, and bizarre.