Park Chan-wook on the pleasures and burden of being undead. By JACOB POWELL.

GET THIS: Catholic Priest signs up for bizarre experimental medical research project, becomes the first subject to survive, and now he’s a Vampire. And still working as a priest. With guilt issues! Could a film sound any better than that? Unless you have vampire aversion, the biggest road block Thirst faces is underwhelming audiences after such a bizarre and promsing premise. But as if – Korean stylist Park Chan-wook (J.S.A., Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy) has hit this incredibly twisted and malleable nail on its head.

If, like me, you believe Thirst can’t possibly get any weirder, then you’re in for a comically surreal ride as Park’s genre mash careens of the beaten logical path into that magic land that seems to exist only in the mind of Korean filmmakers. Maybe it’s the movies I’ve been pointed towards, but it seems to me like every Korean film I’ve seen has this incredibly odd and alien feel to it (although probably not if you’re Korean?). More so than even Japanese or Russian cinema which have more than their fair share of cultural ‘distinctiveness’. I think this feeling has a lot to do with the humour the filmmakers draw out of a piece, and Park is no different. If I had to narrow down Thirst’s principal genre I would say black comedy; and yet it could as easily be classed as horror or even family drama (well maybe that is pushing it!). Sang-hyeon, the young priest in question (played in earnest fashion by Park regular Song Kang-ho) not only has to come to terms with his recent vampirism but also with other matters of the flesh, and in the end the ethical dilemmas all get a bit much for him. Throw in a dysfunctional family he runs into from his high school days and sociopath girlfriend/daughter-in-law Tae-joo (the lithe and sardonic Kim Ok-vin) and you know this a movie experience that is going to mess with your head.

Pick amongst the genres blended and you will find scattered references – as parody or homage or both – to a number of films, Korean and otherwise. For instance there is a wirework roof hopping sequence that could have leapt straight from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger; except for the tongue you can see pressed firmly into the side of the director’s cheek. Another scene sees our trio of ‘friends’ doing a spot of night fishing when Tae-joo gets a hook stuck in her face, as per Kim Ki-Duk’s cyclic sado-masochism in The Isle. A scene of seemingly inappropriately placed physical-slapstick-versus-dry-deadpan amongst some family ‘distress’ could have sat alongside the OTT grieving scene in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. But Park and co. are not just ticking the right genre boxes as with Xavier Gens in his 2007 inbred-Gallic horror Frontier(s) (a filler in last year’s Incredibly Strange programme); they use this less-than-serious vehicle to pick apart Korean cultural mores to the same degree that fellow countryman Noh Young-Seok has done in this festival’s deadpan pick Daytime Drinking. Both films explore issues of class and privilege but whereas the latter uses Korean social drinking ‘rules’ (helpfully outlined on the film’s English language website) as its character interaction framework, Thirst pivots around subverting traditional family roles and religious morality. Particularly amusing is Tae-joo and Sang-hyeon’s choice to leave alive the family member you’d think they would most want dead!

Genre fans will appreciate the treatment Park gives to the vampires arena: here is a film that follows many of the commonly accepted rules of the mythology whilst producing an entirely original outcome. Gone are the devilishly sensual creatures of recent reinvention – all risqué desire a la the Sweet-Valley-High-ness of Twilight or the slightly less sanitised eroticism of True Blood. Instead, Park lays out a vampiric impulse with its essential sexuality mapped into an amoral twisting of humanity sans constraints. That the two lead characters don’t do well in their newfound state is understandable. One is crippled with guilt at repeatedly surrendering to desires he has spent his life and vocation suppressing while the other is living out a lifetime’s worth of angst stemming from what amounts to a childhood/adulthood of indentured servitude. But Park doesn’t judge so much as point out that we create our own monsters and that in the end they will likely self-destruct but not before causing havoc and pain along the way. Like Tomas Alfredson’s recent Let the Right One In, Thirst is a vampire film for the record books – even though I suspect they would find very different audiences, and on the surface would fool many as to which is the darker and lighter of the two.