What Park Chan-wook does so successfully is break genres rules, that would give the Hollywood studios conniption fits.

Is he a genre exploitation movie maker? Yes. Is he an art film maker? Yes.

And no, to both questions. For an art movie would generally not want to delve into extremes of sex and violence just for the sake of it, nor would an art movie leap from tone to tone the way Park does, from horrific, to dramatic, to comedic.

And a genre film maker generally would not want to explore serious themes, to slow down the action to analyse what makes us human, to unsex the vampire story by undressing it from the inside out.

When Park shoots a film, it's damn expensive. He doesn't shoot the long shot and two sideways closeups, of your average Hollywood hack. He wants to apply Hitchcock or Scorsese level camera techniques to genre type plots.

Park will shoot from cranes overhead, to suggest a gods eye view; he will start on a closeup and pull back to reveal an extreme long shot, to dissect and reveal the true meaning of a thing, he will shoot flat frontal shots to create intimacy and existential awareness; he will track with a character to create identification, then suddenly move away from that character to see them as others see them.

Park essentially is like a God of his world, seeing everything from every angle, distance and character perspective. He is like Leonardo da Vinci, dissecting human anatomy, with the same desire to see what makes us tick. What makes groups tick. What makes places function.

He is aided by Korean audiences, who welcome an art movie aesthetic in their genre movies, and who accept a blending and breaking of genre conventions. Korean audiences don't mind not having the comfort of knowing what is going to happen, which is one of the main reasons for making genre movies in the first place: to promise a thing and deliver that thing, like a pacifier to a baby's mouth.

Korean audiences are grown-ups, who welcome experiment in film making.

In Thirst, Park takes the Zola tragedy, Therese Raquin, and combines it with a balls out vampire movie. He blends the two genres to create something new out of two old things. It's like he bought two genres at a charity shop, cut them up, added a little humor of his own, and remade the cut ups into something entirely new.

I don't think this is as exceptional as Oldboy, but it certainly is unique, beguiling, and a superb showcase for the effortless naturalism and impulsiveness of Kim Ok-bin. A memorable movie. :)