Park Chan-wook, whose “Oldboy” won the Grand Prix at Cannes back in 2003, returns to the festival this year with his New Age vampire film “Thirst,” about a medical experiment gone haywire transforming a Catholic priest into a blood-thirsting vampire, may or may not end up on the Vatican’s radar, but based on the generally mixed response its unlikely to inspire many bets for the film taking the Palme d’Or come the festivals commencement.
One of the few totally positive reviews comes from ScreenDaily’s Darcy Paquet, saying that “Thirst” “looks certain to create a stir: adopting a more lyrical mode than before, this complex and supremely inventive work sees the filmmaker back on top form” and is “anchored in a melancholic lyricism that is new to Park’s oeuvre. Although the focus of its narrative movement is not always clear, in its best moments, Thirst offers something of the poetic force of cinema’s timeless masterpieces.” The other comes from Blake Ethridge, unabashedly calling it “the first masterpiece of 2009” noting how it “horrifies you one second, makes you laugh out loud the next and deeply moved in the next. The story is dark as hell and takes you to some dark places of the soul and existence but the way the story gets told never leaves you emotionally detached and never loses its tone.”
Variety’s Derek Elley couldn’t disagree more, calling the film “an overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration. Inspired by and following key plot elements in Zola’s 19th-century novel of murder and adultery, “Therese Raquin,” the two-hour-plus pic is slow to warm up and largely goes around in circles thereafter, with repetitive (and often plain goofy) jokes about hemoglobin lust and bone-crunching, sanguinary violence.”
Daniel Kasman says that “Thirst” “tries to convince us of its viability by trying to make it romantic, the filmmaker’s stupidity and hollowness are all the more apparent” and that Park’s “smug, unconscionable account of supremely stylized violence for the sake of love—in a movie unable to be romantic—is vacated of everything but sadism.”
Mike D’Angelo has his tent set up somewhere between the positive and negative camps, reiterating the notion that “Thirst” “has no sense of rhythm or flow whatsoever” and it “moves like it’s just remembered the parking meter is about to expire ten blocks away and can’t find anything but flip-flops to wear. New settings and characters are introduced so willy-nilly, and consecutive scenes have so little formal or tonal consistency, that you’re generally floundering even as you’re gasping.”
Wesley Morris finds more in “Thirst” to appreciate than others, but still finds his expectations unmet, “The movie contains its pleasures: it’s kinky and crazy, perverse and perfectly shot, assembled, and staged” but “Park puts this energetic gorgeousness into what, for all its sex, comedy, visual ingenuity (his camera really can do anything), is still a vampire film. And vampire films by their very nature come with a set of guildelines that, to my disappointment, Park adheres to. This is a director who, even at his most problematic, does things his way. Here he’s following rules he can bend but can’t bring himself to break.”
If one takes Sweden’s critically acclaimed “Let The Right One In” and box-office success “Twilight” into account, it would be easy to assume that “Thirst” has the potential to ride that wave of the vampire film revival, amongst arthouse audiences in particular, but without the complexity of the former or the built-in audience of the latter “Thirst” may find it difficult to find its footing in international markets, if the Cannes reception is anything to go by.
Not that the Cannes reception should be something one takes too seriously, it’s just something one ought to keep in mind. Maggie Lee notes that, although serious arthouse critics may “balk at the script’s soapy excesses, as well as the tonal discordance of yoking the horror-fantasy genre to a love tragedy with classical, literary trappings,” those who “thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can drink their fill from this film.”