Thirst

Cards on the table: director Chan-wook Park (who made Old Boy and Lady Vengeance) is a not-guilty pleasure for some of us; a visual stylist so decadent he makes Brian de Palma look like Mike Leigh, but who also pumps his movies with more ideas than they can reasonably hold, and then throws in a lighted match and redecorates the walls with the explosion.

In most vampire movies, the figure of the priest is the bloodsucker’s adversary and nemesis. In Thirst, the priest is the vampire (“Drink this, for this is my blood…”). Sang hyun (Song Kang-ho, from The Host) is a good man infected with a little too much hubris, perhaps. Against his bishop’s wishes, he volunteers for a seemingly suicidal medical experiment from which he emerges bathed in bandages – he looks likes The Invisible Man – and hailed by some as a saint.

It’s only when he tastes blood that his festering skin condition clears up. At first he feeds this craving by sucking on a drip during hospital visits to a comatose Catholic, but his carnal appetites assume a riskier edge when he becomes involved with the abused wife of an old childhood friend.

In another reversal of vampire lore, he’s the virgin and she’s the seductress – plunging the movie into film noir, femme fatale territory (I was reminded of Zola’s Therese Raquin and even Clouzot’s Diabolique). Ok-vin Kim is the name of the actress, and she’s quite extraordinary as she slips from downtrodden drudge to full blown harpy.

It must be said, for all his flamboyance when it comes to camera and design, Park often doesn’t seem to have a clue how to go about linking his set pieces. It’s not exactly model storytelling – the movie is drastically overlong (133 minutes!) – but it is intriguing how our identification shifts between the two lovers as the film goes on.

And what set pieces! The movie has at least half a dozen stunningly conceived sequences, ranging from fiercely erotic couplings to ghoulish horror and extravagant CG-action scenes, all mixing scabrous black humour and earnest ethical enquiry.

Be warned, this consummate prettiness also gets downright ugly – Park doesn’t do blood by half measures – but he gets much closer to pulling off the art-house horror hybrid than Lars von Trier managed in Antichrist, and it’s a long, long time since Hollywood seemed capable of producing anything so thrillingly alive.