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The setup has nothing but promise. In a rushed opening movement, Father Sang-hyeon (the exceptional Song Kang-ho) is introduced as a well-liked priest with a nonchalant yearn for martyrdom. He has decided to visit a small clinic to become a guinea pig for a cure to the infectious Emmanuel virus. By the time he is vomiting blood through his beloved flute, the doctors have declared him incurable; they pronounce the time of death just about 15 seconds before he begins breathing again. Blindly hailed as a miracle worker, Sang-hyeon becomes a regular fixture at a weekly Mahjongg game hosted by an old school chum he healed. It is here that he first starts gagging from an overwhelming smell as his friend's wife runs into the restroom to change her tampon.
The hysteria of vampirism is conveyed technically rather than through performance, for the most part. Chan-wook unleashes a scattered barrage of oblique imagery and jacked-up sound design to create an experiential atmosphere, wrangled and leashed by editors Kim Sang-beom and Kim Jae-beom. This confrontational design is quelled, moderately, when the priest begins an affair with Tae-Ju (remarkable Kim Ok-bin), the friend's wife who practices self-mutilation and harbors a long-standing hatred for her sickly husband's family. Bored with her mortality, Tae-Ju goes Lady Macbeth on the priest, driving him to convert her. Painting the inside of their house white is meant to boost the illusion of daylight but suggests an all-consuming purge of humanity.
Overlong by a half-dozen blood spurts and tonally frantic, Thirst's very design, from Chan-wook and Ahn Soo-hyun's script on up, pointlessly complicates and broadens its gleefully paganistic plot. Ok-bin and Kang-ho don't so much enter the horrendous final quarter as stumble into it, beleaguered and exhausted. Ironically, it's the devotion to the material given by the performers that saves the film from becoming unsalvageable. The film's weaknesses, however, run thick throughout. The colors are oversaturated; the dialogue runs deliriously akimbo with tirades of arrested faith and convoluted morals. Some of the more virile encounters lead to some nice sight gags (the priest getting his head stuck in a windshield) but the gallows humor, at times strategically discomfiting, more often feels as if it's gushing from a punctured ventricle.
Tae-Ju and Sang-hyeon are both driven and sabotaged by their fractured humanity, leading to a climactic, hysterical knock-down-drag-out on a cliff before sunrise. It has taken them all this time to find each other in oblivion, but the other shoe has dropped a long time before.
Aka Bakjwi.
Hungry, too.
