Thirst is a much quieter and more subdued film than Oldboy – at least at the outset. Whereas Oldboy was raucously raw and in your face with gutsily uncompromised viscerality, the earlier scenes here following Song Kang-ho’s priest, his ministry and the mah-jong games are quiet and the festival audience waits patiently, clearly expecting them to open up at any moment. But Park takes his time getting there. However, about the point that we see Song Kang-ho conducting the last rites (which is not a plenary indulgence, despite what the subtitling seems to think) and then furtively licking the dead person’s blood off his fingers, followed by him lying on the floor beneath a comatose patient’s bed with an IV tube of blood running down into his mouth, or where he returns from the mah-jong evening and tries to control his lust by beating his crotch with a ruler, we are drawn into the film’s spell.

I recently came across a book entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, which amusingly rewrites Jane Austen but with the addition of zombie hordes. This has apparently been optioned for a film. There is also a film entitled Romeo and Juliet vs the Living Dead (2009), which I have yet to see. One suspects that this satiric collation of highbrow literary works and monster movies may become a burgeoning new cinematic trend in the years ahead. Thirst is in essence the classic French literary work Therese Raquin (1867) by Emile Zola – but with the addition of vampires. There’s a credit at the end “Inspired by Therese Raquin” but the debt of acknowledgement is far stronger than that. In fact, bar the addition of vampirism and the translation of the location to 21st Century South Korea, the plots of both Therese Raquin and Thirst are almost identical. In the book, Therese is an orphan who goes to stay with an aunt and marries her weak son. A childhood friend of the son comes to stay and begins an affair with Therese. The two conspire to kill the son but are haunted by guilt afterwards. The mother then has a stroke and remains paralysed but for being able to move one finger. During a games evening, she nearly gives everything away to the guests by spelling words out with her finger. Park is surprisingly faithful to the original, retaining details like the mother and adopted daughter managing a shop, the murder during a fishing trip and even the guilty couple seeing the dead man in their bedroom afterwards.

At times, Thirst has enough plot for two or three films. You could easily imagine Park Chan-wook building his own Twilight or True Blood saga out of the amount of story he has packed in here. The characters are required to travel some considerable distance. Kim Ok-vin, for example, has a character arc that takes her from abused innocent to cautiously engaging in a passionate affair before becoming a sultry half-mad vampire who relishes claiming victims. The tone varies somewhat and there are periods Park sidetracks off – the film could easily have done without the blackly comic scenes where the ghostly Shin Ha-gyun turns up everywhere, even including between the couple’s bodies as they sleep and try to have sex. During these scenes, Thirst seems to be heading off into some sort of J-horror ghost story black comedy. The main problem would seem to be that Park has been too faithful to the narrative of Therese Raquin when he could have cut some aspects, while the original story feels at times awkward being bent into becoming the story that Park wants to tell.

But mostly, Park Chan-wook holds the show together with admirable regard. There is an undeniable style to the film – something that is much cooler and more controlled than one has seen Park at before. There are times that Park opens up with a poetic grace – like the image of Song Kang-ho meeting Kim Ok-vin in the streets and silently lifting and placing her inside his shoes; or of the two of them hopping between roofs in pursuit of the other. The scene near the end where the mah-jong game explodes out into violence after the mother gives them away is a marvellously sustained piece of control and release. There’s a constantly lurking sense of black humour. One of the finest parts of the film is the climactic scene where Song Kang-ho drives Kim Ok-vin and the mother out to an oceanside cliff in the middle of nowhere and waits for the sunrise that will kill them. It is his resolute determination to stay there against her panicked attempts to find cover – hiding in the trunk, which he just tears off, or under the car, which he simply drives forward – that makes the scene work with a memorable mix of tragedy and humour.

The love scenes between Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin have a tenderness and urgency that has been considerably lacking in any mainstream film that one has seen in some time. The vampire story is not exactly a new one on the whole, but the two actors give it a life that make it work. If nothing else, the scenes have a pleasingly forbidden urgency and passion that makes welcome anathema to the chaste vampiric romance of Twilight (2008) and its ilk.

Thirst should not be confused with several other genre films with the same title, including the unrelated Australian medical vampire film Thirst (1979) and the plague outbreak film Thirst (1998).

(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2009 list. Nominee for Best Director (Park Chan-wook) and Best Actress (Kim Ok-vin) at this site’s Best of 2009 Awards).