Thirst (2009)
Directed by Park Chan-wook
A respected priest volunteers for an experimental procedure that may lead to a cure for a deadly virus. He gets infected and dies, but a blood transfusion of unknown origin brings him back to life. Now, he’s torn between faith and bloodlust, and has a newfound desire for the wife of a childhood friend.
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What critics compared Thirst to
Throughout, The Villainess proves deeply indebted to the work of Park Chan-wook, be it the vicious intro (which plays like a steroidal variation on Oldboy ’s hammer hallway sequence), the story’s commingling of love, revenge and mania, or its fascination with mutating identity (not to mention that Kim Ok-vin starred in the director’s Thirst ).
Kim Ok-bin’s a great actress—go watch Thirst, now now now!—but Sook-hee’s a strangely remote character, and the most vivid flash of personality doesn’t arrive until the final moments.
Sook-hee signs up and is given all the usual training in the lethal arts, as well as a heavy overlay of plastic surgery (from which she emerges in the form of a new actress, Kim Ok-bin, star of the Park Chan-wook vampire flick Thirst).
Thanks to plastic surgery, Sook-hee is soon transformed into a lovely Kim Ok-bin (the female lead in Park Chan-wook’s Thirst.)
Kim Ok-bin , who spills even more blood here than she did in “Thirst,” stars as Sook-hee, who is eventually captured after her rampage and imprisoned in a mysterious underground facility.
This is also the perfect time to mention Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, one of his more underrated flicks, because Ok-bin gives another strong performance there, too, and I enjoyed how this role in The Villainess gave the actress some real opportunities to shine.
Thirst…
After introducing audiences to a new kind of horror with his vengeance trilogy - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance - and then following swiftly with the surreal rom-com I'm A Cyborg But That's OK, the idea of Korean director Park Chan-wook sinking his teeth into a vampire tale was always going to be an intriguing one.
The stylistically elegant bad boy of Korean cinema (auteur of the revenge trio Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance) 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.
HAVING WALKED OUT OF OLDBOY (2003) AT CANNES—preferring a dinner with friends to the spectacle of watching someone swallow a live squid—and fallen asleep long before the halfway point of the DVDs of both Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Lady Vengeance (2005), I can’t call myself a Park Chan-wook enthusiast.
As director of “The Vengeance Trilogy”, which included “OldBoy”, Park specializes in darkly comic grand guignols.
Leave it to the South Koreans—and Oldboy’s Chan-wook Park in particular—to inject new blood into the seemingly eternal vampire oeuvre.
His first Korean-language fiction feature since 2009’s “Thirst,” it’s sybaritic, cruel and luridly mesmerizing.
She's met by mysterious housekeeper Madame Sasaki (Kim Hae-sook, "Thirst," shades of "Rebecca's" Mrs. Danvers), who shows her to her sleeping place, a Japanese style closet outside of Hideko's door, the better to deal with her new mistress's night terrors.
Park drew on Emile Zola’s 1867 novel “Therese Raquin” for his audacious 2009 film “Thirst.”
It’s not the first time the Seoul-based auteur has adopted foreign-penned work – his 2009 vampire tale of self-repression, “Thirst,” was in fact based on Emile Zola’s “Therese Raquin.”