Highly Overrated But Still Good

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Blistering performances.

Chan-wook Park is rightly celebrated for the Vengeance trilogy. Thirst tries to explore the same themes of finding the vestiges of humanity in a cruel world suffused with sex and violence (and quite often sexual violence), but seems too intent on celebrating its excesses and so loses sight of the humanity in the tale. Kang-ho Song as the priest Sang-hyeon, stricken with vampirism the way others pick up hepatitis, is brooding and charismatic. OK-bin Kim as his unfettered lover Tae-ju gives a performance of unbridled passion and energy, but lacking an anchor in a narrative, the histrionics seems to be sound and fury amounting to very little. I didn't hate the film, but felt too hard it was trying to shock me, and so perversely ended up bored.

(I'm not from South Korea so maybe that's why I didn't like this film that much) This film was weird. The scenes between the characters was weird. The sexual scenes were particularly weird. However, throughout the film I was never bored. In a strange way I wanted to keep on watching the film despite it not being that good.It wasn't really a good film. It didn't really make any real sense. It was an extremely weird film to watch. I felt no connection towards any of the characters and some scenes were confusing.Overall, I wouldn't recommend this film. It was somewhat boring but once you started watching it you want to keep on watching it because it's so weird.

Chan-wook Park adapted an original source for the screen and came up with this bold imagining. We have become used to the vampire, perhaps even jaded, but now and then a genre film comes along that looks inspired, injects new life into the world and ignites some excitement. This might not mean the film itself is great, but it does mean it isn't the same old same old. As far as the vampire story goes, this is 'Thirst', about a priest who, through an experiment gone wrong, finds himself craving the blood of another man's wife.As you would expect from any vampire tale, the layers, metaphors and symbolism are all there, and as you might expect from the man who brought us the recent 'Stoker' and the contemporary classic 'Oldboy', the unsettled tone and attention, almost obsession, to visual poetry is present. Chan-wook has the uncanniest ability to put together a film with such an apparently scatological approach, one might think the film a mess; he is able to mash drama, horror, comedy and the absurd, using a twisted romance and emotion as the glue for a work that, when it is all said and done, actually works as a whole. In this sense, you could say this is closest to 'I'm a Cyborg'. Trying to define 'Thirst' as any one sort of film proves extremely tough, and in many other hands it would be an absolute disaster piece. As it stands here, we have an intense, darkly amusing tale of obsession and the demented road love can sometimes take. To those familiar with more of the director's work, a regular theme, and a strangely twisted imagination, is certainly becoming ever clearer. As with certain other films he has made, the apparently simple and bland nature of the tale becomes more strange and dangerous as certain weird, sordid plot points get unveiled.It is not to say this is anywhere near a scratch on his best work; there are some stumbles along the way, most notable of which probably being the struggle the film has finding gear and engaging the audience. That said, once you're there and arrested by the imagery, which Chan-wook always makes compelling, and the rather striking intensity of certain scenes that take you by surprise with their unexpected beauty, rawness, or darkness, you find yourself having to see it through to the end. The end, in this case, being one of the most fascinating elements of the story, and possibly the director's second best finale.....beaten only by 'Oldboy', of course! Quite far from perfection and rough around the edges, but a strange, dark and interesting piece of cinema which, much like 'Cronos' and 'Let the Right One In', attempts to do something different with the age-old icon of the vampire.

I felt that this movie was weird weird weird, and that's no easy statement especially when the movie in question is directed by the guy who did Oldboy, Lady Vengeance etc. This has got to be one of the strangest movies I've seen in a long time. I know that vampire movies inherently have a strange streak through them, but in this case - in my opinion - was detrimental to the movie as a whole. We get what we've come to expect from the director: dark, moody sets; humour as black as tar; quirky characters all playing to a baroque-style strings accompaniment, with a healthy splash of the old vermilion. A vampire movie should be prime Park material, but I think he seems to have over-indulged himself a little bit here - the movie was just way too long for its own good, and nothing much really happens for the first 3/4 of the movie, and then all the necessary action just seems to be crammed into the last 1/4. I was really looking forward to watching this for a long time, but truth be told, i was slightly disappointed - feels too much like a perfect opportunity was missed.