The good folks at Affenheim Theater have been digging in the code of the official website for Chan Wook Park’s Thirst and, despite it not yet being officially released, uncovered the film’s full trailer. Good work, fellas, I’ll be sending over a brass Deerstalker and rosette designed to look like a magnifying glass. This full trailer follows the teaser Peter embedded a few weeks back (as well as a censored Korean version of that teaser).

On the down side, this full trailer doesn’t feature any English subtitles. On the up side, it’s plenty wonderful enough anyway. See it after the break.

Thirst is scheduled for a Korean release on the 30th of April, and then also expected to break out into the international arena at Cannes.

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The first of Park’s films I came across was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and it’s still the one I find to be the most engrossing, challenging and ultimately satisfying. Dishearteningly, his best-known picture, Oldboy, seems to have built much of its cross-over appeal on being “F*ck*d Up”, whatever that means. All the same, his entire body of work from JSA onwards shows an incredible facility with the technical construction of cinema as well as a dedication to moral and ethical inquiry. Simply put, he’s one of the most ambitious as well as being one of the best.

I have to admit that the shots to stir me the most in the Thirst material we’ve seen so far are those in which the character leaps, dangles, jumps or floats. Park has crafted them beautifully, and the one shot in particular which features the leap towards the window, with the composition effectively creating and exploiting an inverted sense of gravity in the frame, really does strike me everytime I watch it. (And you know what, I’ll cap that leap and put it at the top of this post, why don’t I?) Having said that, just about every other shot is a doozy too and that zoom onto the mummified Christ aside I don’t really have any issues with a single frame of it*.

My most recent Park purchase was the Cinema 16 World Cinema disc that included his short film Judgement alongside 15 others, including Guillermo Del Toro’s disappointing Dona Lupe and Jane Campion’s fantastic A Girl’s Own Story. One day, maybe, Park’s two first films Moon is the Sun’s Dream and Trio will be given decent DVD releases and I can cross them off of my wishlist. I know they’ve not got the best of reputations, but there’s no denying my geeky impulse to be a completist.

*For the record, it’s zooms, not bandaged messiahs, that I won’t have any truck with.