Film / Thirst (2009)

"Let no one pray for me."

Thirst is a 2009 horror/drama film directed by Park Chan-wook, best known for Joint Security Area and his Vengeance Trilogy. The film is a very loose adaptation of the French novel Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola.

The film follows Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Korean Catholic priest who contracts vampirism during a medical experiment. Still motivated by his strict religious upbringing, Sang-hyun commits himself to feeding through non-harmful means. Soon, however, he bows to his increasingly powerful urges and becomes infatuated with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), the Cinderella-like wife of a childhood acquaintance. Sang-hyun soon begins making moral concessions to get closer to Tae-ju, who turns out to be much more dangerous than he could have imagined.

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This film contains examples of:

• Above Good and Evil: Unlike Sang-hyun, Tae-ju takes this attitude to vampirism, comparing a vampire killing a human to a fox killing a chicken.
• Adopt-a-Servant: Tae-ju was taken in by Lady Ra as less of a surrogate daughter and more of an unofficial housekeeper - and eventually, as a wife to her son.
• Alone with the Psycho: Lady Ra finds herself trapped in a house with her son's murderers. For extra horror, she's also paralyzed from the eyes downward and completely reliant on them for survival.
• All Women Love Shoes: Tae-ju initially prefers walking barefoot and actively avoids shoes. But the more depraved she gets, the higher her heels get - and more numerous, too.
• And I Must Scream: Lady Ra, who ends up paralysed and completely at the mercy of a duo of vampires, Forced to Watch all their murders.
• Ascended Extra: Looking at as an adaptation of Therese Raquin, Laurent (Sang-hyun) is the central character as opposed to Therese (Tae-ju).
• Asshole Victim:
  • Tae-ju in the end, after Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and becoming just a wild, hungry animal thinking only about herself.
  • When Tae-ju refuses to drink blood if it's not directly from a living source, Sang-hyun settles for summoning the doctor that confessed to taking his time responding to a long-term patient's medical emergency in the hopes he would die earlier than expected and end the frustration of dealing with him. As a bonus, that very incident was what drove Sang-hyun to volunteer for the medical experiment that turned him into a vampire, meaning he indirectly caused the chain of events that came back to "bite" him.
• Awful Wedded Life: Tae-ju is married to a man she not only doesn't love, but openly hate, while being raised by her future mother-in-law to be her rent-free maid. While Tae-ju was lying, just to gain Sang-hyun's sympathy, at least part of her story was genuine.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • A doctor confesses to Sang-hyun that he was so sick of dealing with an elderly, seemingly-terminal patient, he deliberately dragged his feet responding to a medical emergency in the hopes he would die already. Instead the patient slips into a coma and sticks around for a year rather than the previously-assumed two months.
  • Tae-ju wants something more out of her miserable life. She gets her wishes fulfilled once Sang-hyun starts his moral descent, for better or worse.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sang-hyun does his darnest to be a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and is generally a friendly, calm and supportive person, befitting a Good Shepherd. None of which prevents him from murdering supposedly abusive Kang-woo, or, for that matter, taking down Tae-ju once she goes into the deep end.
• Black Comedy: There are a few moments of dark humor, like when Sang-hyun and Tae-ju are arguing over whether they should go through with their plan of murdering Kang-woo. While Kang-woo is sitting right next to them, meekly suggesting that they don't.
• Blood from the Mouth:
  • Blood pours out of Sang-hyun's mouth as he plays the flute just before he dies of the EV disease. Of course, he doesn't stay dead. It happens again later when he experiences another resurgence of the disease.
  • Tae-ju's mouth pours blood when Sang-hyun crushes her throat. He licks the blood off of her chest until deciding to turn her.
• Blood from Every Orifice: After abstaining from blood for a time, the EV disease causes blood to pour from Sang-hyun's eyes and ears.
• Broken Pedestal: Sang-hyun is horrified and repulsed when his mentor, a blind old priest, begs to be turned so that he can regain his sight. This leads him to reject both his faith and the priesthood.
• Car Cushion: Sang-hyun attempts suicide by jumping out of the hospital window after discovering his new condition. With only three cars parked against the hospital, of course he lands on one of them.
• Cue the Sun: The sunrise in the finale, which is the first time we see the sun since the opening scenes. Sang-hyun uses it to commit suicide with Tae-ju, being unable to continue as a vampire or let her prowl around.
• Death Faked for You: Sang-hyun makes Tae-ju think he killed Evelyn, but spares her life.
• Destructive Romance: Between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju. She is an enormous temptation to him, ultimately making him quit the Catholic clergy and compromising many of his moral principles, along with being duped into killing Kang-woo on made-up claims. Their relationship also starts to deteriorate, both from her lies and from the fact that she becomes simply monstrous as a vampire. Ultimately, they are unhappy with each other and commit suicide together.
• Double Meaning: Everyone at the table thinks that Sang-hyun and Tae-ju talk about Majhong while they actually talk about having sex.
• Downer Ending: Tae-ju kills all her friends and Sang-hyun and her drive out to the edge of a cliff. Sang-hyun does a Heroic Suicide and makes it so that Tae-ju dies with him.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Tae-ju, especially after becoming a vampire, when her already pale skin becomes porcelain white.
• Emergency Transformation: Sang-hyun nearly strangles Tae-ju to death when he realizes that she lied about Kang-Wu abusing her, then changes his mind at the last minute and vampirises her before she dies.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: ALL the main characters minus Lady Ra die at the end.
• Face Death with Dignity: In the end, Sang-hyun just calmly waits for the sunrise, embracing Tae-ju. This is further contrasted with Tae-ju, who, while accepting their inevitable deaths, cries in despair and is visibly scared.
• Face–Heel Turn: Tae-ju started off as a mistreated Woobie berated by her mother-in-law and in an unloving relationship with Kang-woo. Then when she becomes a vampire, she kills people indiscriminately, including her close circle of friends.
• Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product: Vampire blood is hinted to be able to heal not just its owners injuries and ailments, but others' as well. A minuscule amount falling in Lady Ra's food may have had a small effect on her paralysis; before consuming it she is visibly trying and failing to move her hand, whereas afterward, she successfully begins moving a single finger, which leads to her outing Sang-hyun and Tae-ju for murdering her son.
  • Also makes Priest Roh's fate Harsher in Hindsight: a few drops of blood, rather than becoming a vampire, may have been enough to cure his blindness. Same goes for the people convinced that Sang-hyun could cure their various ills.
• Femme Fatale: Tae-ju, who seduces Sang-hyun, convinces him to murder her husband and, after he turns her into a vampire, becomes a gleefully amoral predator.
• Fingore:
  • When Sang-Hyun volunteers for the medical study he suffers the effects of the Emmanuel Virus, one of which is his fingernails falling out.
  • Also, Tae-ju breaks several of Sang-Hyun's fingers while trying to force him to let go of a trunk hood.
• Foreshadowing: With a bit of Leaning on the Fourth Wall thrown in; soon after becoming a vampire, Tae-ju turns on the television for Lady Ra to watch, remarking that "a scary movie's gonna be on". It marks a point when the horror ramps up as Tae-ju becomes increasingly amoral and murderous.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Sang-hyun does his best not to kill anyone. He takes blood from a comatose patient he believes would have given his blood freely to the hungry. He also provides peaceful suicides.
• Fully-Embraced Fiend: Tae-ju rather quickly after becoming a vampire, where she indiscriminately kills people left and right, many of whom are her friends and colleagues, and shows no restraint whatsoever of any kind - further contrasted with Song-Hyun's attempts to be a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire.
• Hemo Erotic: When Sang-hyun is alone with Tae-ju, he wants to have sex with her and wants to drink her blood - and does both, at the same time. She wonders out loud if it is weird that she enjoys it.
• Heroic Suicide: Sang-hyun decides to face the sun, no longer able to control his hunger - or Tae-ju, for that matter.
• Horror Hunger: It's heavily implied Sang-Hyun treats his vampirism like this, trying to stave off the hunger by all means feasible. Tae-ju has no such reservations.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad: The two main characters experience quite a lot of this, though their relationship was fraying well before Tae-ju becomes a vampire.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Arguably Tae-ju, who feels just miserable living a mundane life as a mistreated housewife and looks for any way to escape her lot.
• My Beloved Smother: Lady Ra dotes on Kang-woo, who always seems to be ill.
• Never One Murder: Tae-ju ends up killing most of her family's friends after Lady Ra conveys to them that she and Sang-hyun killed Kang-Woo.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Lady Ra first raised Tae-ju to be her servant, then married her off to her awful son to make sure she won't leave.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: Using a simple code of slow/fast blinks, Mrs. Ra reveals that Tae-ju and Sang-hyun killed Kang-woo.
• Oh, Crap!: Tae-ju when she drunkenly lets slip that Kang-Woo never hit her, which was Sang-hyun's motivation to kill him in the first place.
  • Lady Ra gets one of truly epic proportions when Tae-ju blurts out they had murdered Kang-woo. One can clearly see, even through her lack of expression, the absolute horror of her situation come crashing down: Completely paralyzed, utterly helpless, and entirely at the mercy of her son's murderers. And that's before she witness Sang-hyun brutally murder Tae-ju and start gorging on her blood...
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampire blood can heal your infirmities and illnesses, but only so long as you're full of it. Vampires don't grow fangs, but they can still suck blood from bite wounds. They're super-strong and almost totally immune to damage, but do have the typical weakness to sunlight. Sang-hyun also briefly flies.
  Park Chan-wook: I had the idea of telling a story about a Catholic priest first, so in having him turn into a vampire… If he had a fear of the cross, or the crucifix, it just wouldn’t make the rest of the story viable at all. So, actually, I had to get rid of that convention. And also, in Korea, all the food that you eat has garlic in it. They put garlic into everything in Korea. So, if you’re scared of garlic, there’s no drop of blood you can feed on in Korea. [1]
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Initially, the meek and withdrawn Tae-ju prefers to go barefoot all the time - including running around the neighbourhood, much to Sang-hyun's confusion. But the more she descends morally, the more and higher-heeled shoes she owns.
• Religious Vampire: The whole plot revolves around what would have happened if a Catholic priest became a vampire. While desperately trying to cling to his faith as a way of remaining a good person, he ultimately gives into despair and decides to kill himself alongside the woman he loved because she turned into a monster.
• Riddle for the Ages: Sang-hyun seems to believe that he got a transfusion of vampire blood in Africa. How vampire blood came to be in an African hospital is never explained, nor does Sang-hyun make any attempt to find out.
• Stop Worshipping Me: Sang-hyun becomes famous as "the bandaged saint" after miraculously surviving EV. A small group of followers camp outside his monastery, to his great annoyance. In the end he pretends to try to rape one of them so that they'll abandon their vigil.
• Suicide by Sunlight: Definitely on Sang-hyun's part, less voluntarily on Tae-ju's. Either way, they both watch the sunrise in the finale, even if Sang-hyun has to first destroy any possible hideout and forcefully drag Tae-ju to the hood of their car.
• Sympathetic Adulterer: Tae-ju has been so horribly abused by everyone in her life, particularly her mother-in-law and her unloving, uncaring husband, that it's genuinely hard to blame her for trying to start an affair with Sang-hyun, as he was the only person that ever treated her with care and respect. At least part of it is made up, solely to get easier with Sang-hyun, but even when her lies start to fall apart, her adultery remains in positive light.
• Taking You with Me: Sang-hyun to Tae-ju, as he makes sure she has nowhere to hide from the incoming sunrise.
• Undead Barefooter: Inverted with Tae-ju who preferred going barefoot while she was alive, but starts wearing higher and higher-heeled shoes as she transforms into a vampire.
• Unreliable Expositor: Tae-ju. While at least some of her stories are real, eventually she starts both clearly lying and slipping on various details of previously made claims.
• The Vamp: Tae-ju slowly turns into a literal version, eventually becoming both a full-blown vamp and a vampire, while having Sang-hyun tightly wrapped around her finger.
• Vampires Are Sex Gods: Played with. Sang-hyun no longer needs his glasses, dropping the mousy posture and easily attracting female attention, while Tae-ju cleans up nicely, both in her appearance and confidence. On the flip-side, the virus that causes vampirism comes from a disease with leprosy-like symptoms. And the only thing keeping it at bay is fresh, healthy blood, thus combining Horror Hunger with Glamour Failure.
• Wicked Stepmother: A subversion. Lady Ra is tough on Tae-ju, but during a drinking session she reveals that she does care about Tae-ju and plans to put the family business in her name. Tae-ju makes Sang-hyun believe that her family is much worse than they really are.

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