The Cameraman's Revenge

It may seem odd to characterise a vampire film as being a bit bloodless, but that was the first thing that came to mind watching this; maybe it was the predominance of blue tones through the film that gives it that feeling of coldness. Interesting to compare the Korean and American trailers on the DVD; the former places much more emphasis on the affair between our hero—a Catholic priest who subjects himself to a medical experiment that somehow inadvertently transforms him into a vampire—and the wife of an erstwhile friend, while the latter is more about the vampiric transformation. The tension between these two narrative emphases, the torrid affair and the horror story, is one that Thirst never entirely resolves, though it offers some startling imagery along the way. Part of the problem is that our hero is a bit bland; as a priest he’s a nice bloke, he submits to this experiment out of a desire to help others, and it’s that desire which not only leaves him with something of an ethical quandary (how do you satisfy the need for blood when you don’t actually want to kill for it?) but reintroduces him to his old friend, who becomes just one client for what are considered his miraculous healing powers (alas that the film doesn’t really explore the small cult of followers he attracts after being the only surviving test subject from the experiment). But it’s the wife who ultimately becomes the more interesting character, welcoming the possibility of her own vampiric transformation; for her, monstrosity is a viable alternative to the life she’s found herself in. Thirst is a slow burner that is ultimately much too long at 133 minutes; not until the second hour does the real fun begin. When it does, though, the film does lift itself; it is ultimately satisfying, though it does take its sweet time getting to that point.

I don’t watch many films on TV these days; if I’m counting right I’ve only seen about 20 of the 150+ items I’ve reviewed on this blog so far on TV for the first time (plus a handful more repeat viewings). There are various reasons why, but certainly one is the bloody ads; when SBS capitulated to ads during programming instead of just between them, it was kind of like one more nail in the coffin. Also, of late, there just hasn’t been an awful lot on TV attracting me to sit down with it, other than the Schlocky Horror Picture Show on Friday nights. But the TV guide on Sunday revealed that on Thursday night SBS were showing something I actually did want to see for once, namely Park Chan-wook’s follow-up to his vengeance trilogy… a love story set in a mental institution. Korean audiences apparently didn’t find the terrific shooting spree in the middle of the film enough after Park’s previous work, maybe cos it was, after all, a hallucination by one of the young lovers… a shame, cos I enjoyed this rather a lot myself. What intrigued me was that the film is described as a “romantic comedy, surrealist film” by Wikipedia, and given the setting it seemed like the sort of thing which could go horribly wrong; it’d be terribly easy to mmake a comedy about mental illness that laughs at rather than with its characters. That Park doesn’t do this is quite impressive, and while the film does find some humour in the patients’ strange behaviour it evinces more compassion for them than anything; I wonder how often in avowed romantic comedies you find yourself rooting for the young lovers (she thinks she’s a cyborg, he thinks he can steal people’s souls) in the way you do here, particularly when deep down you know there isn’t actually a lot of hope for either of them attaining a happy ending.

“Fucked-up” is one fairly adequate way of summarising this film about a man who believes the Earth is about to be invaded by aliens from Andromeda, and so, as part of his strategy to save the Earth, he kidnaps a businessman he suspects of being an alien and tortures him. Seems designed for instant cult status, but is it actually any good? That, alas, is a question I’m unsure of… I quite like a good bit of genre hopping and this has that in spades, but it seems to have far greater trouble handling its tonal shifts, and I think the decision to present at least some of its material seriously undermines it; there’s too great a clash between those scenes and the more comic/camp business. Also, I’m not sure the film is really quite as batshit loony as it thinks it is; its high point of inspiration is a brilliant retelling of Genesis where apes evolve from humans and back again, but nothing else is quite so great as this. Factor in a rather obvious and slightly muffed concluding “irony”, and I’ve got to say I was left less fulfilled by this than I was hoping to be.