In Thirst, director Park Chan-wook puts his own sick twist on last year’s most fashionable of monsters, the vampire. But not for him the chaste, winsome creatures mooned over by pre-pubescents; Thirst is a characteristically brutal, bodily affair. Leading Korean actor Song Kang-ho plays a priest who tries to sacrifice himself in a medical experiment to save those suffering from a particularly disgusting disease, but when he’s as good as dead he gets a transfusion of vampire-infected blood and is resurrected as one of the undead. His Christian morality and humility are no match for his new carnal desires, and as he succumbs to his lust for a friend’s wife – finding she isn’t the demure damsel in distress he thought – so he’s sucked into a mælstrom of grisly violence and murder. Quite as crazed and appetitive as its characters, Thirst tears after a rush of ideas and images, cramming its 133 minutes with a schizoid mash of tenderness, horror and obsessive eroticism; tying everything together, crucially, with dark, unhinged humour.