From the acclaimed director of the global hit Old Boy comes a shockingly original vampire story with a chilling, erotic style. A blood transfusion saves the life of a priest, but also transforms him into a vampire. He struggles to control his insatiable thirst for blood until a love affair unleashes his darkest desires in deadly new ways. Hailed as “Daring, operatic, and bloody funny!” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly), Thirst is a truly wicked love story that takes classic vampire lore to twisted new heights.

If the director of Oldboy makes a vampire movie, it stands to reason the result will not be like any other vampire movie. So bare your neck for Thirst, Park Chan-wook's dark, lugubrious tale of blood-drinking and mad love. It launches with an apparent miracle: a priest (The Host's Song Kang-ho) dies after submitting himself to an experimental vaccine, yet somehow returns back to life. Acclaimed as a holy man, he's not entirely well--and his sickly condition can only be improved by ingesting blood. Having set up this character, Park then steers the story into a black-comic version of Zola's Therese Raquin, as the priest meets a young married woman (Kim Ok-vin) whose family unit is bizarre and stifling. Thirst moves at its own pace, as slow and dazed as an animal after feeding, and any reassuring genre momentum gets idled in Park's portrait of behavioral weirdness. The trade-off for this sluggishness is Park's original take on vampirism and cruelty, which culminates in a remarkable final ten minutes or so, a sequence that might have been inspired by silent cinema. It's sometimes a chore to get there, but the payoff is worth it. --Robert Horton