by Jason Adams
What's funny looking back on Kim Ok-bin's work in Park Chan-wook's 2009 vampire film Thirst for the first time in a decade is just how brief her character Tae-ju's time as a bloodsucker actually is in the movie. Over the past ten years my memory had turned Thirst into the "Tae-ju Supernatural Vampire Olympics" -- she had opened her maw and swallowed the whole movie whole. And yet in actuality Tae-ju doesn't get turned into a vampire until the last half hour of an over-two-hour film -- her character is there, very much there, but Song Kang-ho's conflicted priest Sang-hyun is the main course. Until he isn't.
Kim is just so damn good that I think any of us would be excused for having handed her the stage. Even before she's turned, as the saying goes, she's already nibbled down the film's edges until it's become Her Shaped... Tae-ju, like all great femme fatales, becomes simultaneously the lead schmuck and the audience's obsession. Thirst is very much a Noir looking back on it now, only Fred MacMurray's got superpowers that Barbara Stanwyck can now exploit to off her useless husband with. Tae-ju feigns all innocent victimhood, just long enough to get all she came for, and all she came for keeps upping its ante -- once immortality's on the table well forget about it. She'll have a side of that to go.
Still the scene that stuck with me then and still now does come from Tae-ju's pre-killer days, when Sang-hyun first shows off to her all that their post-lives together could be, before her bad girl instincts take over -- Sang-hyun takes her in his arms and leaps off a building, bounding down into the street, up into the sky, two ping-pong-ball people redoing the Superman spiel, his giddy Lois Lane cradled in his arms and finally understanding what real freedom could look like. Kim's giddiness is an infectious here as any comparable superhero scene -- we're learning to fly again in Spider-man, in Avatar, our eyes starry alongside her.
You nail a moment like this, and she does, and you can forgive a person who does some terrible stuff to recapture that feeling an awful lot. Even after we've watched her happily slaughter every person in sight in Thirst's bloody final act, once she's given in to her bloody urges, it's impossible not to root for her as Sang-hyun decides their fates for the both of them, trapping them on a seaside cliff as the sun rises. Who does this man with his morality think he is anyway? Give me the Tae-ju sequel where she bounces her vicious way through a billion inadequate men. That's the movie fantasy for me.
