'Thirst' is a vampire movie with intellectual heft

R • 2 hours 13 min • 2009

This new Korean vampire flick leaves Hollywood's bloodsucker tale 'Twilight' standing. Rating: * * * *

The new film from the South Korean director of Oldboy is a stunning feast for the senses but veers off-track with its overlong meditation on vampirism.

Like the Swedish curio Let the Right One In, Park Chan-Wook's take on the vampire thriller heads off in weird and quite unexpected directions.

Park Chan-wook of South Korea is today's most successful director of horror films, perhaps because there's always more than horror to them. He seems to be probing alarming depths of human nature. Maybe that's why he can simultaneously be celebrated on fanboy horror sites and win the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Song Kang-ho wants to do good in a world where a lot of good needs doing. A friar assigned to a Korean hospital—and not one of the cushy wards—he helps ease the suffering of those who suffer the most. He even volunteers for a highly experimental, and not entirely Church-approved, medical study to combat a deadly,…