Thirst (2009)

When Park Chan-wook moved on to I'm A Cyborg But That's OK, it was supposed to be a temporoary break from the darkness of the Vengeance Trilogy. Thirst, about the struggles of a Catholic priest who becomes a vampire, would be his return to darker form.

The surprising thing is that this film is a romantic comedy in the same way as Cyborg: which is to say, there's romance and there's comedy, but the details are like nothing you've ever seen.

I'm not sure what to make of the messiness of the narrative or the bizarre forays into slapstick. It's interesting that every time the mood gets too sombre, it's punctured by a bathetic anticlimax -- we can never take this K-Lestat too seriously.

Perhaps that's the point. Most vampire stories pay lip service to hunger, corruption, brooding sexuality -- this is the only one I've ever seen that shows it in all its licentious glory.

Jim Ridley in Variety is on the money:

Park's voluptuous style fits a genre that is all appetite—or should be. With Twilight, the vampire movie for vegetarians, as only the most obvious example, mainstream movies on the subject now seem freaked out by the messiness of intercourse: Throat-sucking is OK, but God forbid any other parts see action. The violence in Thirst is less shocking than the slurpy physicality of the sex scenes, oral ravishings that extend to toes and armpits. As the priest's senses unfurl, the whole world seems made of meat—the obscene adipose rippling of Kang-woo's waterbed is a particularly grotesque manifestation of erotic hunger.

Excellent.