THIRST had me slitting my wrists

It's probably mostly my own fault that I didn't like Thirst. I mean, it's the latest from Park Chan-Wook, who's incest-driven revenge thriller Old Boy would probably wind up on my top ten list if I were to ever sit down and hash one of those damn things out, so expectations were high. Not talking Thirst up in my own mind was nearly impossible, and I just could not help myself from saying "OMG Thirst is going to be awesome!" to anyone who would listen. My apologies to anyone who saw this on my recommendation because sitting through this movie was more of a chore than doing orphanage dishes, and if Problem Child taught me one thing, it's that orphange dishes are the worst dishes of all.

A local priest, Kang-ho Song, means to do good by sacrificing his body to a far away research facility who is developing a vaccine for EV, a violent and deadly infection which causes horrible lesions before making you bleed from every damn orifice on your body and die. The infection takes the priest's life, but he is transfused immediately with fresh blood, reviving him but leaving him with the vampire virus which if he does not feed deteriorates, allowing the effects of EV to take him over.

At first able to satisfy his hunger by feeding from the blood of a coma patient, Kang-ho Song finds himself desiring other sins of the flesh, desires which he satisfies with an old friend, now married and living her life in servitude. The love triangle is the catalyst for the rest of the movie, but I'll leave out the details.

That sounds all well and good until you start watching this movie and after about 45 minutes you realize, "Holy crap, this movie is unbearably boring." I know how Park Chan-Wook movies work. They start slow, giving you hints of excitement and scenes that hook you in, but generally they take their time building up to an exciting climax that makes it all worth the wait. There's no difference with Thirst except that there's no hook to keep you interested on the way up to the top, so instead of a gradual build there's a steadfast boredom and instead of a climax the movie's wrist eventually gets sore so it just stops giving you the slowest hand job you've ever gotten.

What was really disappointing was just how much the vampires were just normal vampires. Word out of the festivals was that this movie took a different view on vampires, doing something really unique and innovative. That was not the case. When you boil it down, this was a love story, albeit a strange one, but a love story nonetheless and it could have been done differently, especially by Park Chan-Wook, it just wasn't.

Sure Thirst was full of very weird hallucinations, creepy people, and Chan-Wook's signature awkward sex scenes, but all of those things just felt slapped in there in order to make the movie feel different. I can easily describe to you in one word the way all of these 'unique' factors felt.....forced. Every weird thing felt so forced that it seemed like the already boring story was being raped by weirdness in order to make the film seem more exciting. Unfortunately for Thirst, the more 'out-there' it got, the more unhooked I got.

The ending felt like an 8th grade wood shop project. There was a clear idea, but the builder had no blueprint to follow so all these pieces are just kind of thrown together with bent nails sticking out and glue dripping all over the place. Pardon my awful analogy. The movie pump fakes you about eight fucking times before the credits mercifully start to roll. Every scene past about the hour and a half point are incredibly out of place and just kind of slapped on to live up to the usual 2 hour+ run time. There were a couple of points where it could have ended well, but the movie trucks along into Way-too-long-ville which was the final nail in Thirst's poorly built coffin.

Thirst was definitely a Park Chan-Wook film through the lens, but what was being filmed felt more like a Takashi Miike piece which could have worked out for the best, but instead worked out for the worst. You really need to watch Audition to get what I mean, but all you horror fans out there will get where I'm coming from.

You may need to see this movie to believe it. If you're like me, you'll probably read this and say "Oh no way! It's Park Chan-Wook there's no way it is bad." But unfortunately it is, and it'll throw you almost immediately into a boredom coma. Decently filmed, forced uniqueness that isn't unique at all, aggresively boring.

2 stars

Comments

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