Review of Thirst / 박쥐, directed by Park Chan-wook

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

That said, when it comes to movies, my home base has always been Korean cinema. I began loving movies in high school, and I didn’t take it seriously until I moved to New York for college and enrolled in a Korean cinema course my first semester.

Throughout the years, even when I worked as a film critic at an online outlet, I always came back to Korean cinema and covered it. I’ll never forget opportunities like going to the New York Film Festival and watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movies, or meeting filmmakers freely.

Starting this blog in 2021 was the perfect outlet for me, as it gave me a space to freely talk about movies without the restrictions of worrying about whether anyone was going to see it or not.

I’m finally catching up on my backlog of movies and writing this reviews in the coming of months, as I’ve always half-written these posts and then never finished them. Thirst is one of those half-written reviews, and I’m finally sitting down to write it today.

Let’s get into the post; I don’t want to bore you with the details of this review’s context in the introduction alone!

When a Catholic priest is turned into a vampire, it leads to some serious moral questions from him.

Our protagonist in this movie is portrayed by Song Kang-ho, and his name is Sang-hyun. He works as a Catholic priest and people respect him for the services he gives, as well as the moral compass he seems to live by. He often volunteer at a local hospital by giving ministry to patients, but beneath this front he puts on, he’s actually pretty sad about his life.

He decides to volunteer for an experiment on a vaccine for a prominent virus, but the experiment fails. Sang-hyun is injected with the disease, which is likely to be fatal, but much to everyone’s shock, he recovers from it quickly and survives after receiving a blood transfusion.

His congregation spreads the news, and people begin believing he actually has a god-given gift for healing. People begin appearing in droves to his services, including a childhood friend named Kang-woo. Kang-woo invites Sang-hyun to his mahjong nights, and Sang-hyun begins falling in love with his wife Tae-ju.

Tae-ju doesn’t live a happy life with her husband, and she thinks that her mother-in-law is someone who is overbearing.

Sang-hyun then relapses and wakes up a vampire, no longer able to go into the sunlight. He feels like he literally has a new life, but begins questioning himself when he has to drink blood from someone in a coma. He decides to kill himself, but fails, and the symptoms of the virus return when he doesn’t drink blood.

So he begins stealing blood packs from the hospital. He begins an affair with Tae-ju, who finds out the truth of his condition, but when he asks her to run away with him, she says they should just go ahead and kill her husband instead. At the monastery, too, one of Sang-hyun’s higher-ups asks for vampire blood so he can cure his eyes and see again.

Sang-hyun leaves the monastery after that request, and moves into Kang-woo’s mother’s home so he can keep seeing Tae-ju. When he sees bruises on her, he assumes Kang-woo is hitting her, and he decides to kill him. He does so on a fishing trip, then kills the blind guy at the monastery and feeds on his blood.

The police begin investigating, and Kang-woo’s mother turns into an alcoholic. We learn Kang-woo never hit Tae-ju, which angers Sang-hyun because that’s why he killed him. Tae-ju asks to be killed, Sang-hyun obliges, but then he feeds her corpse his blood and revives her as a vampire. Kang-woo’s mother sees everything.

However, Tae-ju doesn’t have the same moral compass, and will kill anyone for food. He tries to fight her, but then Kang-woo’s mother tells his friends the duo killed her son. They are forced to kill the friends, but Sang-hyun tricks Tae-ju and lets one escape. They put Kang-woo’s mother in the car and Sang-hyun drives them to a field with no cover.

On the way, they run into some of his worshippers, but he convinces them he’s a monster who raped a girl. The two arrive at the field, Tae-ju realizes she’s been tricked, but the sun rises with nowhere for them to hide. They burn into ash as Kang-woo’s mother watches.

Overall Thoughts

Thirst actually ranks a bit higher than the Vengeance Trilogy for me due to how maturely Park addresses his themes. While the trilogy resorts to violence, this movie puts its thematic notes on the axis of a Catholic priest turned into a vampire, showing an ethical struggle through religious ideologies.

I liked that a lot, and this is such a fascinating movie to watch because of this struggle. Tae-ju proves to be the foil of these ethics, as once she gets what she wants, she refuses to adhere to the same set of morals.

Go watch this if you haven’t already and want to. I think it’s worth watching at least once in your lifetime, that’s for sure. I enjoy revisiting this one even.

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