What’s that nice Korean priest doing in the hospital ward, sucking the blood from a patient’s IV bottle? He (Song Kang-ho) is the victim of a botched experiment that has turned him into a Seoul-stirring vampire. And Tae-jun (Kim Ok-bin), the nearly mute wife of the good Father’s childhood friend, is just the sexual partner for this virgin vampire. Their love proves to be both sacred and insane: sacra-mental. And the movie goes splendidly nuts with them. From director Park Chan-wook, best known to DVD connoisseurs for his Vengeance trilogy, comes a film that melds with the obsessions of its characters, strips the moorings from genre expectations and leaves viewers asking if the film has lost its mind or they have. This is a vampire movie that gets down to the essentials: ecstasy, pain and all the bodily fluids, especially blood. If you’re going to do a love story, make it a mad love story.
