Dry spell

Plodding vampire tale Thirst is another
uninspired clunker from Park Chan-Wook

TOOTHLESS: Ok-vin Kim and Kang-ho Song

by MARK SLUTSKY

Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 film Oldboy caught North American audiences’ attention with its vivid and strange story of captivity and revenge (and one hallway-set fight sequence that’s still being imitated—see this year’s Observe and Report for a very similar scene). For the mainstream, or at least left-of-mainstream North American audience, it was an indication of the creative explosion that had been going on in Korea for some years.

But there was already some indication that Park’s talents were somewhat constricted. The third movie in his “vengeance trilogy,” Lady Vengeance, which opened here in 2005, featured much of the same visual audacity, but it seemed empty and even pointless beneath the surface. Now with his latest, Thirst, it’s become evident that Park has nothing left to say, if he ever did at all.

Thirst is yet another take on the vampire genre, which has proven to be enduring and flexible, so you can’t quite be mad at the film for that alone, even if we have been overrun with Twilights and True Bloods and Let the Right One Ins lately. What you can be mad at, though, is the movie’s truly boring and inert shot at the evergreen story of bloodsucking, madness and romance.

Kang-Ho Song plays a Catholic priest named Sang-hyeon, who’s infected with vampirism while undergoing an experimental vaccine for a mysterious disease that’s been killing missionaries (an entire plot that’s forgotten about as soon as it’s brought up). Surviving the treatment, he finds himself hungry for blood and preternaturally strong. When, driven by these new desires, he finds himself in an adulterous relationship with the fiery Tae-joo (Ok-vin Kim), the movie turns into a loose adaptation, no joking, of Émile Zola’s Therese Raquin and descends into a repetitive and uninteresting family melodrama, but with fangs.

The main problem with this over-two-hour-long lump is its intense inertia; save for a couple of joyful rooftop sequences, it’s a plod. You never really get the sense, at least for the movie’s first half, of what Song wants or what drives his actions, and when the film becomes another vengeance-flavoured story of mutual torment, it becomes clear that Park’s well of creativity has been sucked dry.

THIRST OPENS THIS FRIDAY, AUG. 7