'Thirst'Produces Strange Monster of Good and Evil

“Thirst” (2009)

 

To be exact, “Thirst” is not a movie about vampires. Director Park Chan-Wook uses vampires as a tool to express his motives.

 

In the Catholic Church, holy fathers are priests. It takes a long preliminary period until one is ordained to be a priest. Priests normally have an image of ethical cleanliness. But in this movie, the leading role, Sang Hyun, who is a priest, becomes a vampire by accident and against his will. It is cruel fate for a priest, who has to sermon others on not to kill others and not to commit adultery. As a vampire he cannot avoid living off the blood of others. It is as if the director is tempting the lead character on whether if he can abstain from fulfilling his worldly desires. When Sang Hyun (Song Kang-Ho) is revived from the dead as a vampire and returns to Korea he is already a celebrity with the locals. It is almost as if the faithful seem to believe that Sang Hyun has been sent by God to redeem them from their troubles.

 

Sang Hyun cannot live without drinking the blood of others, and because of this need for survival, he slowly abandons his moral standards. When in the past he taught believers not to commit suicide, he now helps them to commit suicide with their blood in mind. In this process the director begins to portray the interior dilemmas of the priest as a stage of war between good and evil, and between desire and reason. The most difficult human desire that Sang Hyun had trouble in abstaining from, sexual desire, eventually leads to him sleeping with the wife of a friend. His statement in the movie that he “cannot believe that desiring someone sexually can be a sin”, seems to be coming from director Park.

 

Desire is a basic need of human nature. The movie seems to question the teachings of religion that it is necessary to suppress this basic need. After all, a vampire needs blood for basic survival. Just as a wolf hunts for rabbits, a vampire might, for its basic existence, need to hunt for humans.

 

In the latter half of the movie, director Park creates another vampire, named “Desire”, who has grown up while feeding on the blood of Sang Hyun. Unlike Sang Hyun, who continually agonizes because of his ethical beliefs as a Catholic priest, this newly created vampire “Desire” is completely true to his wants and needs. He thinks it is natural to hunt for human blood as a vampire.

 

Besides portraying the war between desire and reason, Park also portrays how reason can be clouded by desire and eventually lead to the commitment of sin. For example, he shows us how the commitment of murder can burden us with guilt and agony. He also shows the divide between sexual love and platonic love, and how sexual love can easily change if sexual wants are not fulfilled.

 

Sang Hyun is the sole survivor of a virus experiment involving 500 participants. It is for this reason some Catholics believe that if they pray through Sang Hyun, all their illnesses and diseases will be healed. Their reasoning functions are paralyzed by their need and want for healing. It becomes as severe as to the extent that they believe Sang Hyun is not a mere human but someone sent from up above. However, this belief is turned upside-down when Sang Hyun exposes his genitals to them. The exposure of genitals shows that Sang Hyun is a mere individual who also has sexual (and other) desires. The director aims to address sexual desire through this exposure scene.

 

Park also aims to show how human behavior changes when desire is not restrained and humans become slaves of desire. “Thirst” does not move far from Park’s previous films, which addressed the question of guilt, redemption, good and evil. This movie may have slightly more focus on desire and the control of desire through reason. Through the lead character, Snag Hyun, the director throws the question of guilt and the ambiguous nature of good and evil towards the audience. Sang Hyun cannot help but be a strange combination of good and evil where desire and reason collide. Park seems to want to say that Sang Hyun is not the only strange combination, if also a bat. He seems to want to tell us that all humans are in some way or the other, rather like a bat.

 

 

The conclusion of the movie seemed rather typical Hollywood-style, in that it seemed to allude that all human problems start from internal desire and that the only way to redeem oneself is through self-sacrifice. 

 

The good use of color is prominent throughout the movie. Shades of “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” come across, but perhaps this movie is a more “evolved” version. Feelings of grotesqueness will surely discomfort some viewers. The director’s sense of black comedy is still very much alive in this movie. In some ways feelings of watching a horror movie will be felt since all settings are rather extreme.

 

A lot of controversy is expected after the opening of this movie. Comments of a wide variety and of both ends of the scale are expected.

 

 

P.S. Viewers will be able to understand the significance of the two posters at the top of this review after watching the movie.