Director: Chan-wook Park
Writers: Émile Zola, Chan-wook Park
Stars: Kang-ho Song, Ok-bin Kim, Hee-jin Choi
2 Hours, 15 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2PpziSI
Synopsis
A priest, Sang-hyun, comes into the hospital room to visit a dying man. The man talks about giving cake to some starving people. He wonders if God will remember that, 30 years later. The man soon goes into arrest, and the nurse and priest do CPR. The man goes into a coma, but does not die. Later, Sang-hyun does confession for a suicidal nurse. A patient tells him he wants to go to a special lab that is doing miraculous things, and Sang-hyun says he is tired of all the patients dying.
Sang-hyun goes on vacation to the lab, where they work to cure a rare disease, “The Curse of Basira.”. He volunteers for a dangerous experiment, to test a possinle cure. The doctor wants to make sure he’s in his right mind for volunteering for this, because it’s really dangerous. They give him the treatment in hazmat suits and a clean room. It’s clearly not something any sane person would want to try.
A month passes, and his blisters are spreading; he’s got the disease, and he’s going to die. One day he’s playing a flute, and he fills it with a gallon of blood. He gets a transfusion to replace all that he’s lost. He is pronounced dead, but a moment later, he gets up again.
Six months later, he leaves the hospital, covered in bandages. He is now known as “The bandaged saint.” He’s the only one who survived out of fifty volunteers who survived. After a while, he starts looking more and more normal and the bandages come off.
He’s invited to a dinner with the family of Kang-Woo, someone he helped in the hospital, and Sang-hyun mentions that he can smell blood, and the girl in the room just happens to be having her period. Sang-hyun helps the girl, Tae-ju, who is ignored and abused by the family, who adopted her as a baby. That night, his hearing gets super-sensitive, and he passes out. Meanwhile, Tae-ju fantasizes about killing her adopted brother/sort-of husband, Kang-Woo.
Morning comes, and we can see the sunlight burning into Sang-hyun’s bare back as he lays on the floor. His blisters have returned, so the bandages go back on. He gives last rites to an accident victim who is gushing blood, and he notices all the blood. He gets some blood on his fingers, and he licks it all up. Next thing we see is Sang-hyun sucking blood out of IV tubes like a straw, and his blisters go away very quickly. He’s a full-fledged vampire now.
Sang-hyun encounters Tae-ju one night while she’s out running barefoot, and he can see the blood pulsing through her veins. They kiss. They have sex, but are interrupted by her family screaming for her to do some chores. Tae-ju starts volunteering at the hospital on the days when Sang-hyun works there. They start regularly having sex during his slow times there. He bites her, and she likes it. He lets her watch him suck out a patient’s blood, and she freaks out, but get over it quickly.
His blind, elderly mentor priest wants to become a vampire so that he can see again. Sang-hyun quits the priesthood and moves in with Tae-ju’s family. Tae-ju is padlocked in the room with her brother so she can’t get out. We see that Sang-hyun sleeps by day in a wardrobe laying on its side. Sang-hyun wants to kill Tae-ju’s brother, Kang-woo, but she keeps talking him out of it, until he finally gets to the breaking point and removes him from the game.
Sang-hyun’s blisters return, and he soon finds that he has a group of cult-like followers. He eventually kills his priest-mentor and drinks him dry, solving the blister-problem. He’s still very unwilling to kill anyone, although by now, he’s killed at least two people. He then starts feeding off Tae-ju. Kang-Woo’s mother drinks herself into a heart attack. They still haven’t found Kang-Woo’s body, and Sang-hyun smells him everywhere. They start seeing him everywhere, which allows for a little comedic action.
Tae-Woo lets it slip that Kang-Woo never laid a hand on her. Sang-hyun wants to know why she wanted him dead then. He only killed the man because she said he beat her. She loses her mind and wants Sang-hyun to kill her, which he does. He then sucks her dry. He then feeds her corpse some of his own blood, which does what vampire blood usually does. She recovers completely. She starts draining men right away, and he does not approves, as he gets volunteers to feed him. She has no problem killing humans, but he does, and they fight over this quite a bit.
He feels the guilt for every person she kills (and she kills a lot), so he decides to solve the problem by driving them both out to the isolated beach and throwing away the car keys. Then the sun comes up.
Commentary
The blisters and gore are very well done makeup. It’s a very bloody, sucky, licky movie, with a lot of literal blood-sucking. The flying/jumping scenes are really well done, I assume with wires. Visually, most scenes are colorful and have a lot to look at, and the sets and scenery are great as well.
It’s a very slow-paced story. A lot happens in this film, but it all feels somewhat drawn out. This could have been a good miniseries if they had wanted to go that route.
The main conflict arises between the pacifist Sang-hyun and the abused, but vindictive, Tae-Ju. Which outlook is right? Again, this is a really slow-paced movie, but I did really like it.