Nightcrawler Kim Ok-bin needs a good stiff drink.

Death, guilt and regret permeate the oeuvre of Korean director Park Chan-wook, so the vampire genre he investigates in Thirst fits him like a custom-made coffin. Park, who earned a spot on Afflictor’s Top 20 Films of the Aughts list with Oldboy, tells the story of priest Sang-hyeon (Song Kango-ho) who becomes a vampire while somehow surviving a volunteer medical experiment that should have killed him. When he’s not busying sucking down spare platelets at the local hospital, the holy man hooks up with the very unbalanced Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), a waifish woman with a seemingly tortured family history. And she’s likely to only get worse–far worse–if she should somehow become a vampire.

Thirst is probably too many things, careering from horror film to romance to dark comedy to erotica to psychodrama with dizzying speed. And the movie has its misogynistic side, fearing a female planet even more than one inhabited by vampires. But Park has the undeniable knack for creating a sense of ruefulness like no other contemporary filmmaker, and he maintains an impressive miasma of mourning right down to the sad, pitch-perfect conclusion.