film, eyeballs, brain

Park Chan-Wook’s new film, Thirst (Bakjwi), is a bloody mess. Quite literally: blood spills on floors, trickles from eyes, spurts from necks, dribbles from mouths, and gushes out of flutes; it gets quaffed, sucked out, licked off, vomited, refrigerated, and microwaved.

But it’s a bloody mess, too, in the ways that matter.There are a lot of interesting ideas to chew on here, but it’s tucked into an unnecessarily convoluted plot. Sang-hyeon (played by the always remarkable Song Kang-Ho) is a burnt-out priest who has begun doubting his faith, wondering if his efforts to save people are truly effective. He heroically signs up as a volunteer to test a high-risk vaccine for the Emmanuel virus (E.V.) that — if I understood it correctly — seemed to afflict only Caucasian and Asian missionaries, at least in Africa. (Didn’t I write it was convoluted?)

Sang-hyeon ends up contracting the disease, dies in leprous agony on the operating table after a blood transfusion, only to rise like Lazarus, the sole survivor of E.V. (Imanu’el, indeed, but only with him.) Upon his return to Korea, the priest, his face swathed in bandages like the Elephant Man, is hailed as a hero with healing powers, mobbed by people wanting him to lay their hands upon the sick.

All is well, one figures, with Sang-hyeon — he is able to save more people than ever before — until he realizes that something is wrong with him: the sunlight does some horrid things to his skin, he starts experiencing auditory hallucinations, and the smell of blood seems strangely inviting. He runs into a childhood friend, the feeble Kang-woo (played by Ha-kyun Shin, another Park veteran) and his miserable wife Tae-ju (Ok-vin Kim, both mousy and smoldering), who invite him to their weekly mahjong games. Not all is happy in their household, however, especially since it’s lorded over by Tae-ju’s alcoholic shrew of a mother-in-law, and the priest’s new presence in Tae-ju’s life, well, leads her into temptation. And vice-versa. It’s a terrific setup for a movie, really, but it’s overloaded with half-coagulated religious metaphor and the nagging sense of intellectual paths not taken.

(I might add that the unnaturally gorgeous Mercedes Cabral, whom I last saw getting knocked up by her projectionist boyfriend in Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, has a small role here as some sort of mail-order bride. Which means that Thirst is her second Cannes premiere — the third being Mendoza’s infamous Kinatay — which surely must count as some sort of record for a Filipina actress.)

Park is interested, as he said in the Q&A after the screening, in challenging the restrictions of genre — he referred to it as a “fence” — but in doing so in Thirst, he seems to have forgotten that those fences are there for a reason: they circumscribe and, in turn, shape the audience’s expectations. My disappointment with Thirst isn’t that Park has violated the rules of the genre; it’s that he doesn’t fully explore the logic of his violations.

Vampires, of course, are the most erotic of all horror creatures — though a case can be made for werewolves on screen, come to think of it — not just because of their obvious oral fixations, but because (at least according to lore) they have to be invited in. It’s that element of seduction and surrender that heightens the erotic quality, and Park plays up that link between vampirism and lust. There’s a satisfying amount of noisy coupling and slurping — the Foley artist must have had so much fun — but it all feels strangely disconnected from Sang-hyeon’s vampireness.

“Do you know how hard it is for me not to kill?” he yells at one point. But that’s the problem, really: we don’t. Indeed, Sang-hyeon doesn’t seem particularly affected or puzzled by his condition; as a previously quizzical man of God, he is surprisingly unintrospective about what has befallen him. The film could have been so much richer if it had at least depicted this tension more explicitly — or even the struggle between celibacy and carnality — but it simply doesn’t.

The twist here, among many, is that Sang-hyeon is the vampire, but it is he who gets seduced. But it’s a clumsy, comic affair — and granted, initial seductions can be that way — but the sight of Tae-ju trying to pry the unwilling priest’s knees apart has the effect of sucking all the air out of the scene, no pun intended. Park can’t seem to settle on a particular mood — perhaps as part of his project to upset audience expectations, but I’m reading too much here — and the laughter jolts the viewer right out of the spell he has woven. Both Park and his fellow Korean director Bong Joon-ho — who quite frankly is the better of the two — have used this erratic, unsettling switching of moods to great effect (most notably in Bong’s Memories of Murder), but it simply doesn’t work here.

Part of the problem is that Park, working from his and Seo-Gyeong Jeong’s screenplay, can’t quite pin down how a vampire priest is supposed to behave. (Bear with me here.) There’s a lot of mileage that can be gained from this rich contradiction, but Park just doesn’t explore this further. An hour into the movie, one pretty much forgets Sang-hyeon is actually a Catholic priest, except for his fastidious morality. Wouldn’t it have been a better film if we saw him going along his merry consoling way, still visiting parishioners and hearing confessions, both repelled by his addiction and thrilled by his sudden power? He doesn’t.

Instead, Park simply paints on different layers of complexity, but it’s all on the surface; for instance, Sang-hyeon, who only “wants to save people” from a deadly virus (that subplot gets dumped in the first fifteen minutes), is suddenly faced with the opportunities to rescue people by condemning them to a life of sucking blood. There are a lot of balls being juggled in the air, and one can’t help but think that all the unnecessary contortions of the screenplay are there only to add an ironic symmetry to the whole thing. (Did I mention that there’s also a paralyzed woman in hanbok, a subplot from Emile Zola, and a threesome with a ghost? This is essentially the part in the movie when one forgets Sang-hyeon is a vampire. Didn’t I say it was convoluted?)

Oh, but there’s a lot of fun to be had for the Oldboy fanboys in the audience: not just the sickly green and fluorescent blue palettes, but the multiple wrist-cuttings, neck-snappings, finger-breakings, tongue-slicings, ankle-choppings, and a full-on face plant, for instance. But the gore here seems more gratuitous than normal precisely because, unlike in Oldboy, so little is at stake. (Vampires regenerate, after all, and non-speaking actors are meant to be vampire fodder.) When the inevitable finally happens (though it comes way too late in the film — let’s just say that Sang-hyeon isn’t alone in his vampire activities anymore), the scene is set up, hilariously, as a parody of the “Love Dance from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“. And it works because the audience finally sees something slightly more subversive: the gleeful pleasure of indiscriminate slaughter.

Park’s masterpiece to date, Oldboy (2003), had as its motive force a single-minded, Old Testament-like, obsessive quality that kept you riveted to the screen, despite its incredulities piling up from the very beginning. I loved the Vengeance trilogy, but Thirst feels like a major step backward — an elaboration not of the trilogy’s ideas about retribution and solace, but of their gory, bloody bits. Thirst is a mess of unexplored ideas, and all the more disappointing in comparison to Park’s body of work. Indeed, seen in this light, Park’s solidly conventional North-South Korea border thriller Joint Security Area (2000) begins to rise much higher in my estimation simply because it’s haunted by a very human sincerity — something Thirst, with all its empty gestures towards something more profound, wholly lacks.

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1. Louie Psihoyos, “The Cove” (2009).
2. Hayao Miyazaki, “Ponyo” (2008).
3. Tomas Alfredson, "Let The Right One In" (2008)