Thirst (2009)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Have you ever wanted to be bad?
Really bad?
Park-Chan Wook’s Thirst is the vampire movie for you.
Thirst is the story of a Priest (Song Kang-ho) who isn’t particularly good at his job. He’s an orphan who was raised by the church to be a clergyman, but he’s not a very kind fellow, doesn’t sympathize with the depressed people who come looking to him for advice and is stuck in the soul-crushing situation of either watching people die every day or get terribly sick. Depressed with his lot in life the Priest decides to martyr himself by becoming a volunteer test subject for a new vaccine to cure a deadly illness; the vaccine fails and unfortunately for the Priest leaves him up the Ebola creek without a paddle. After coughing up more bodily fluids than Linda Blair, the Priest gets an emergency transfusion of blood, dies and then mysteriously recovers. Returning home to find himself hounded by religious fundamentalists who believe he’s the recipient of a miracle, the Priest soon discovers his inhibitions lowering, as he finds himself swimming in an ocean of debauchery, sexuality, gambling, perversity, mayhem and a sudden inexplicable taste for human blood.
Park-Chan Wook’s Thirst is like a vampire movie written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It has a sense of madness and objective clarity; it is equally filthy and sterile, sweet and bitter, sexy and repulsive, all at once. Thirst is not the vampire movie for people who want their vampires castrated and cuddly and cliché. There is no kung fu here, no karate battles between the undead for the unrequited love of a willing victim. Indeed as one vampire states with a sense of biting, fiendish simplicity: “A willing victim? What’s the point of that?”
Thirst is a movie about love. So yes it is funny, it is kooky, it is strange, it’s kinky as all hell, and it is very, very dark and brutal.
Thirst is about being attracted to the wrong person; it’s about how you know someone will utterly destroy you and yet you love them anyways, because you just can’t freaking stop yourself. Thirst is about how our raw emotions and desires prey on our morals and personal character. How love can be wantonly destructive in our lives and tear down everything we ever cherished, while giving us our heart’s desire.
Thirst reveals that within our deepest subconscious minds, concepts like freedom and love are of kindred spirit to chaos and obsession. They are one and the same, mirror images of each other, and the line that separates them can get really damn blurry under certain circumstances.
The conservative ideal of love in cinema is that it cures all ills, fixes all your problems, makes you a better person and saves your world. The ideal of love in cinema is that it is a deus ex machina, and if you believe in it just enough you can do anything; and that is some toxic, unrealistic, advice. Love is like a fire, it can keep you warm and bring light to your life but if you let it get hot enough and out of control, it will eat you alive.
That’s not an idea that people like to hear, love is suppose to be ‘happily ever after’, not mutual self-destruction; but Disney lied.
Park-Chan Wook does not.
Thirst also deconstructs religious concepts like the idea that morality stems from religious thinking and that without religion there would be no morals. In Thirst, through the absence of boundaries, by embracing debauchery, the Priest learns morality and gains humanity. In the beginning of the film he is surrounded by religion, but he is self-centered and self-obsessed, he does not truly value his life or anyone else’s and his act of supposed martyrdom is an act of selfishness, a suicide with a loophole. Only when the Priest becomes a monster does he truly understand what it meant to be a human being, only through pride does he understand humility, only through gluttony does he see the value of charity, only through wrath and rage does he appreciate kindness and only through lust does he finally understand love. So when the Priest is given another chance at martyrdom, this time he attempts it for the right reasons, because he’s learned what it means to truly sacrifice oneself for the greater good of humanity.
In Thirst there are no easy answers, there are no simple black and white issues and in the context of the film, sometimes the ends do justify the means, because life is not as simple and straight-forward as the generalizations people put on their bumper stickers.
The point of Thirst is that we’re told by institutions and religions that life is about the choices we make, but if there’s nothing of value in the wrong choices, than there is no choice at all.
Thirst explores the values of evil and immorality, it argues that these dark and terrible elements that people choose to believer are separate from the human race, are actually a primal, important part of our character and that without them, there is no hope of either understanding people or being human.
Thirst speaks to the rebellious nature of people; it tempts us to kick down the sand castle and makes being a vampire look equally disturbing and exhilarating. Yes there’s the whole murdering people, cutting off their ankles and draining their bodies into the Tupperware part of the job, but on the bright side you don’t have to listen to your annoying step-mother’s bitching anymore.
On top of being thought-provoking and daring, Thirst is also the funniest vampire movie ever made, bar none, hands down, this movie takes the cake for gallows humor. I’ve never laughed so hard, so loud and so much during so many grotesquely morbid scenes in my life, and it wasn’t just because they were weird, it was because Thirst is very clearly, a diabolically evil film that revels in every chance it gets to break the rules and tear apart social and spiritual taboos. This is a dark comedy with a serious bite.
I think that Park Chan-Wook is one of the most distinctive and important voices in modern filmmaking and his ability to deftly create consistent, effective and original narratives in the medium is literally second to none at this point in his career. The people who believe this man doesn’t deserve recognition for his skills are enemies of art and should be run over by a combine harvester driven by me.
This brings me to the critics at Cannes who underplayed the genius of Park-Chan Wook’s Thirst.
These critics really dropped their balls on this one. And I don’t mean dropped their balls in that they missed a golden opportunity to display how trendsetting they can be, by recommending a tremendous and truly groundbreaking horror film to the public at large. No. I mean they dropped their balls in that this movie freaked them out so completely and challenged them so easily, that their testicles fell out of their trousers and booked a one way trip to Yugoslavia. Listening to film criticism regarding Thirst was like listening to Helen Keller trying to sing the National Anthem. Their criticism boiled down to ‘The Movie was yucky and weird’, which I guess is a legitimate critique of the film, if you are a six year old child who has been beaten about the head with a frying pan.
For those of us who are adults who aren’t afraid of a sophisticated horror film, that attempts something new, in particular with a concept as boring and overdone as vampirism, Thirst is phenomenal. And it is the best vampire movie since Wall Street.
So yes ladies and gentlemen. Thirst is very yucky and very weird, it also defies genre, dares to question traditional morality and ‘common sense’, and it is easily one of the best motion pictures of the year.
See it.
Order it on Amazon
Watch the trailer:
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[ ‹‹ The Canyon (2009) The Fourth Kind (2009) ›› ]
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