After his immensely popular Vengeance Trilogy and the commercial misstep I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook returns with his technically brilliant, visually luscious vampire movie Thirst. The story combines sex, violence and perverse dark humor with dose of melodramatic tragedy inspired by Emile Zola’s 1867 novel Therese Raquin, the latter about a young woman entering into a feverish affair to escape from a cheerless marriage.
The story opens with Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a devout Catholic priest, who wants to save the world through his own suffering. He offers himself for a vaccine trial in the hope that it will help discover a cure for a deadly African virus. The trial proves lethal, but Sang-hyun rebounds from death after a blood transfusion, a miracle that prompts a cult following that reveres him as a savior with healing powers. The modest man of the cloth soon realizes that the vim and vigor his followers take for divine signs are in fact a side effect he picked up from the experiment — vampirism.
Unlike conventional vampires who crave only blood, Sang-hyun finds himself driven by carnal desire. He locks eyes with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of his childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun). The sullen young woman lives with her sickly, infantile husband and tyrant mother-in-law (Kim Hae-sook) in a state of servitude. She is bored, dissatisfied and wants Sang-hyun to get her out of the torturous marriage. This is where the film taps into Zola’s story, but turns it into a wacky drama of gore, mass murder and all-consuming love.
In taking on the vampire genre, Park has done away with wooden stakes, garlic cloves, Transylvanian mystique and the seductive sophistication of Dracula. The film is full of drab, stifling domestic spaces and the nocturnal predator is played by an infected man of God with a hard-on he can’t flagellate away.
The dilemma of a vampire priest provides a promising setup for Park’s characters, who tend to be trapped in extreme circumstances not of their own making and are forced to make difficult moral choices as a result. However, when compared with the director’s previous films, such as Cannes-winning Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), Thirst is significantly less shocking and perverse, with the protagonist often portrayed as more comic than tragic.
Thirst goes nuts as it proceeds to become a melodrama obsessed with pain, ecstasy, and bodily fluids that carry guilty pleasures and deadly viruses. The explicit sex scenes go far beyond tame throat-sucking and extend the mutual oral euphoria to armpits and toes. Erratic in style and mood, the movie drags in the middle, and the focus on the pair’s all-consuming relationship significantly weakens the iconoclastic momentum promised by the transgressive storyline. A scene in which Sang-hyun rapes a female adherent amid a crowd of his followers toward the end of the film feels like a feeble reminder of Park’s anti-clerical agenda.
The story would suffer greatly without the fine performance of South Korean thespian Song Kang-ho, who carries the film’s themes of guilt and conscience. However, it is the 22-year-old Kim Ok-vin, also known as Kim Ok-bin, who is the eye-catching surprise in Thirst. The young actress, at first a creature of docility, evolves from a downtrodden housewife to femme fatale to blood-guzzling demon. She is the answer to the male fantasy that a sexually awakened woman is simultaneously irresistibly voluptuous and utterly destructive.
Anyone who has been to Alishan (阿里山) is familiar with the railroad there: one line comes up from Chiayi City past the sacred tree site, while another line goes up to the sunrise viewing platform at Zhushan (祝山). Of course, as a center of logging operations for over 60 years, Alishan did have more rail lines in the past. Are any of these still around? Are they easily accessible? Are they worth visiting? The answer to all three of these questions is emphatically: Yes! One of these lines ran from Alishan all the way up to the base of Jade Mountain. Its
The entire saga involving the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and its Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) continues to produce plot twists at such a rapid pace that fiction publishers would throw it out for being ridiculously improbable. This past week was particularly bizarre, but surprisingly the press has almost entirely ignored a big story that could have serious national security implications and instead focused on a series of salacious bombshell allegations. Ko is currently being held incommunicado by prosecutors while several criminal investigations are ongoing on allegations of bribery and stealing campaign funds. This last week for reasons unknown Ko completely shaved
The only geopolitical certainty is that massive change is coming. Three macro trends are only just starting to accelerate, forming a very disruptive background to an already unsettled future. One is that technological transformations exponentially more consequential and rapid than anything prior are in their infancy, and will play out like several simultaneous industrial revolutions. ROBOT REVOLUTION It is still early days, but impacts are starting to be felt. Just yesterday, this line appeared in an article: “To meet demands at Foxconn, factory planners are building physical AI-powered robotic factories with Omniverse and NVIDIA AI.” In other words, they used AI
The rhythms of bustling, working-class Mumbai are brought to vivid life in All We Imagine as Light. The stunning narrative debut of filmmaker Payal Kapadia explores the lives of three women in the city whose existence is mostly transit and work. Even that isn’t always enough to get by and pay the rent. One of the women, a widow, recently retired from working her whole life at a city hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is even facing eviction. The other two, roommates and co-workers in the maternity ward are in different parts of life. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has a husband from an
RSS