Metacritic reviews

A gaudy, daring, operatic, and bloody funny provocation of a melodrama from Park Chan-wook.

A terrific film. Loosely based on Emile Zola's novel "Therese Raquin."

Are you hungering for that rare vampire movie with serious intellectual heft, ravishing undead, biting passion and a healthy splash of irony as well as iron in all that spilled red blood? Wait no longer, Korean auteur Park Chan-wook's Thirst should satisfy.

Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.

Stunning production quality and the story's extremity should arouse interest beyond the specialty Asian market.

The movie's evolution from somber spiritual torment to icky body horror to fetishistic sex to wild lyricism (vampires pogoing off buildings) to Grand Guignol splatter is exhilarating.

The most intriguing aspect of Thirst is the steady erosion of Sang-hyeon's ethics, slackened from "do not" to "do not kill" to "do not kill the undeserving" by the lure of those O+ cocktails.

Unfortunately, it is also less than the sum of its parts -- overly long, lacking in narrative momentum and too often choosing sensation over coherence.

Forget "Twilight." Fans of vampire movies are not likely to see anything more graphic, extreme or twisted than Thirst.

An overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.