Thirst

Why do so many otherwise normal people like to imagine having their blood sucked out of them? Just thinking the thought gives my skin a faintly thrilling frisson, and I'm definitely otherwise as normal as can be. Except for my fetish for wordplays like the effing one in the previous sentence. Its proper name might re-enter my memory momentarily, maybe ...

Be that as it may, the Korean box-office champion of 2009, Thirst, deserves serious attention (and its 2009 Cannes Jury award). It's a simple tale of a Catholic priest, a fairly common character in Korean life and movies. This time he's an orphan, and volunteers as a guinea-pig for a medical clinic testing vaccines for a deadly virus. The sole survivor, he returns to his Korean parish to discover that his leprous outbursts can only be repressed by drinking human blood. French cineastes will smell a Zola novel being re-worked.

Give such a standard vampire scenario to a good director (Park Chan-wook), scriptwriters (Park and another) and lead actor (Song Kang-ho) though, and a remarkably successful exercise in dramatic surreality and black comedy is created. There is a supporting cast of Grand Guignol, yet credibly human, characters who take the doomed priest into their home and hearts -- an evil-natured megalomaniac schoolmate and his doting dressmaking mother, woefully-abused and morally-challenged wife and their household's innocent Filipina amah.

The storyboard cuts from incongruity to illogicality, comic horror to thwarted love, always surprising its audience with unexpected camera angles and shocking character insights. Dead people re-appear, a paralysed woman stares melodramatically, suppurations blossom and fade. Everyone thirsts for something extra, for mahjong wins, divine touches and eternal love.

As vampire-movie cognoscenti know, the sun always rises. Brilliantly, dramatically, black-comically, in the parched scenes of Thirst's startling ending.

[Back at the beginning, in case you didn't know before I did -- I'd mislaid "alliteration". I've often found that when I play with words, I lose at least one ...]