Thirst
Thirst is kind of a Korean True Blood, the hit HBO vampire series but you’d never guess it during the first half hour of the movie. Sang-hyeon (Kang-ho Song) a troubled priest in the largely non catholic Korean peninsula. His faith is self defeating as it lacks the miraculous power that he envisioned having as a man of the cloth. After nihilistically volunteering to act as a human guinea pig for a vaccine against EV, a viral infection with no cure, he returns home as the only survivor of the experiment to a messiah’s welcome. He later figures out that he was transfused with vampire blood (of curious extraction) and worse, realizes that the EV syndrome returns unless his undead side gets fed. Luckily most of his work is doing palliative hospital care so there is a ready supply of fresh haemoglobin. When he revives a terminal childhood friend, that family welcomes Sang-hyeon into their home where his friend’s wife Tae-joo (Ok-vin Kim) turns out to be a kindred spirit and that bond leads to a torrid affair. However once she joins him as a creature of the night it become apparent that she is not as innocent or persecuted as she lets on. Thirst looks to answer the question “will a latent human sociopath turn into a sociopathic vampire?” It’s also a little self indulgent logging in at what feels like longer than 130 minute leaving viewers feeling as drained as many of the victims but like Let the Right Oen In, this is another interesting although more polished example of another culture adopting and adapting the vampire legend.