Critics reviews

Park Chan-Wook constantly tests the limits of acceptability... though he's developing a kind of philosophical slapstick that's very funny. The final sequence is a comic miniature worthy of Laurel and Hardy, yet suffused with a tragic grandeur. The film is way too long, and quite sick, though Park's demented lyricism will stay with you.

A vampire film without really being one, Thirst is also very much like a Park Chan-wook film without being properly Park, so far does it fall short of his fiendish standards. Despite flashes of flamboyant mischief, its 133 minutes feel like a vampire’s lifetime, and it’s appallingly patchy.

This is a truly bizarre movie, a tragicomedy that Graham Greene might have written in collaboration with Bram Stoker. But it's repetitive and overstays its initial welcome.

This is no simple vampire comedy, though — a climax set on a pre-dawn beach is moving and weirdly funny, staging a possible suicide pact as a Laurel and Hardy-like routine.

Put simply, Thirst isn't quite as scary and shocking as it really ought to be, and the storyline is a little overloaded with incidents that would be more potent in a purely realist, non-vampire context.

For all its flaws, this is a breathless, invigorating experience, a headlong plunge into Park’s personal abyss and a surprisingly thoughtful take on flawed human morality. That it’s also a rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms ‘Thirst’ as one of the year’s more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.

It may be unfair to continually expect Park Chan-wook to deliver a new movie as thrilling as his critically acclaimed 2004 film Oldboy. But although Thirst... lacks its predecessor’s shocking originality, Park’s formidable talents still result in a flawed but entertainingly perverse love story, one that’s also a thriller, a horror film and a black comedy.

Despite closing with one of the most memorable final shots of any vampire film, ever, you're left with a feeling not of dread, nor even of joyous release (and certainly Park does not stiff us on the manic, frantic sex scenes), but with the gnawing, clawing feeling that a funny thing happened on the way to the graveyard, and you missed the joke.

Park descends too enthusiastically into sensation and carnal excess, and it's a disappointment, although it's interesting to see what a quick and willing convert the young wife becomes.

In this delirious but deeply committed battle between the bohemian vampires and the petite bourgeoisie, between a man trapped by the patriarchal church and a woman who wants to annihilate everyone and everything... despite its baroque flourishes, is a fairly conventional vampire film...

The stylistically elegant bad boy of Korean cinema... makes clever leaps between longings of the spirit and desires of the flesh, as well as between the traditions and strictures of old Korean culture and the lures and confusions of the new.

While nothing in “Thirst” is quite as shocking or perverse as some of the best-known moments in his “Old Boy” or “Lady Vengeance” — by which I mean that no children are murdered and no live cephalopods swallowed whole — there are elegantly presented servings of sex and gore. Mr. Park and his cast offer moments of creepy, winking humor and also of intense emotion, a combination that is a hallmark of this director’s oeuvre.