Reticulating Splines

Thirst is entertaining and well-executed, but nowhere near the level of quality I’ve come to expect from Park Chan-Wook. Many scenes felt very contrived either in their challenging of traditional Korean values or their attempts to be metaphoric. These fail because they’re excessive and add nothing of importance to the film (the sex scenes) or they confuse the audience and muddle up the plot rather than aid it (the hallucination scenes). There’s also the issue of how the different plot and character points fall into place a little too easily, but that is forgivable given the lightness with which they’re treated. Those flaws aside, Thirst a fun and refreshing take on the vampire sub-genre if only because it doesn’t harp on being a vampire flick, and it’s got great style and tension and some very well choreographed sequences, but it often gets bogged down by its overt cultural statements and doesn’t ever match the grandeur of Oldboy or the scope of Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance.