Here is the ideal Park Chan-wook film: one man and one woman beat and torture one another, each one having a go until the other is so badly hurt that, in theory, the audience wants to see the victim have his or her turn, taking vengeance and beating the other until our sympathy and bloodlust shift again. Repeat for two hours. Park’s various revenge scenarios (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance) pretty much follow this reprehensible path, and when his new film 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.
The pitch that must have greenlit the film was obviously “vampires meet Zola’s Thérèse Raquin,” which makes no sense to me, as vampirism is already romantic, corrosive, and murderous enough that tacking on—as Park awkwardly does half way through—the complex plot and psychology of the Zola novel shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the very subject of the film. With Let the Right One In barely out of theaters, reminding us of the complex otherworldly bonds and deep romanticism of vampire lore, and Coppola’s Cannes entry calling us back to the perfectly stylized genre of his Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 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.