Acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook hopes his sexy, gory, tragic vampire movie will make you ... laugh?

A Korean gentleman in a beige sports coat, he was friendly, charming, and soft-spoken on a visit to Honolulu. You would never know from his attitude that he is the hottest director in South Korea (and one of the most-talked-about worldwide).

Asked what he thinks of his first visit to Hawai'i, he grinned widely and said (through an interpreter) that it is so bright and warm and cheerful here that it would be a perfect setting for a murder movie.

Park was in Honolulu on July 26 for a special advance screening of "Thirst," his award-winning new vampire movie, for an audience of Hawaii International Film Festival members. Before the screening, he was presented with HIFF's Vision in Film award, which has previously recognized directors Zhang Yimou, in 1995, and Ang Lee, in 1997.

Park sat down for a quick interview with the Advertiser, ran out for some steaks with his interpreter, and returned to the theater after the movie for an engaging Q&A session with the audience.

"Did you laugh a lot?" was the first thing Park wanted to know from the audience, and he beamed with pleasure when people shouted back exuberant affirmations.

As Park later explained, the more you laugh, the more you understand the tragedy of the character.

"Thirst" won the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival this year, but Park said his audience at Cannes seemed to hold back, perhaps worried that laughter would be disrespectful.

Park wanted to be sure that the people in Hawai'i felt comfortable laughing even though the film was dark.

And they did.

This is a movie that wrings laughs from the ubiquity of its violence and desperation of its monsters, as when a priest explains, with some resignation, that the best way to get blood out of a dead body is to cut off its feet and hang it in a bathtub. The grinning corpse of a particular victim, which keeps popping up in more and more awkward places, is another recurring filmic joke.

THE PLOT

As Park's comment about murder in Hawai'i may have suggested, duality, contrast, and hidden darkness are appealing themes to the director, and they are evident in "Thirst." The protagonist is a priest who becomes a vampire by accident, then wrestles to reconcile his faith with the strange and powerful new urges he is feeling.

The priest, played by Korean megastar Song Kang-ho ("The Host," "JSA") turns into a vampire because of a tainted blood transfusion he gets after volunteering for a vaccine trial that goes horribly wrong. In the wake of his seemingly miraculous survival from a fatal disease, he finds that the number of his parishioners has swelled — but he has to drink blood to avoid recurring symptoms.

Along with newfound strength, the ability to heal his wounds and resist disease, and a dangerous weakness to sunlight, the priest develops powerful senses and a forbidden lust for Tae-Ju (played by former beauty queen Kim Ok-bin), an orphan married to the priest's childhood friend.

The priest also struggles to develop morally acceptable ways to drink his parishioners' blood (like sucking on the IV of a coma patient).

The pale Tae-Ju, who can't stop sleepwalking, seems herself to be one of the undead — trapped without hope in a loveless marriage to her goofy husband, and enslaved by her overbearing mother-in-law.

Her dalliance with the priest (with some very erotic love scenes; "Twilight" this is not) brings her to life, even as the priest's soul sinks beneath the weight of the increasingly serious sins he commits.

Events spiral out of control for the priest and his lover, with adultery, self-mutilation, murder, grimly hilarious hallucinations, rooftop vampire tag, resurrection, misguided messiah worship and a darkly funny game of paralyzed charades that ends in a literal bloodbath (pun intended).

Park mentioned George A. Romero's B-movie bloodlust thriller "Martin" (1977) (Romero is better known for his 1978 zombie film "Dawn of the Dead"), Andrzej Zulawski's arthouse horror film "Possession" (1981) and Werner Herzog's vampiric horror film "Nosferatu" (1979) as movies that inspired him in "Thirst."

He has no interest in several standard vampire tropes. Garlic and crosses are no deterrent in "Thirst," and that's lucky for the Korean priest — all those crucifixes and kim chee would have made his life as a vampire really difficult.

PARK'S CAREER

Behind Park's friendly smile is a visionary, literate and darkly kinetic filmmaking mind. A philosophy major in college, he was planning on being an art critic until he saw Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958), and determined then and there he had to become a filmmaker.

His first two movies were not financially successful, so between making them he worked as a film critic to support his family, but he said it was frustrating to write about films rather than make his own.

His third film, "JSA," is about a murder investigation that uncovers an illegal friendship between soldiers on opposite sides of the Korean DMZ. It became the most successful movie in South Korea at the time and gave Park the freedom to devote himself entirely to filmmaking.

In comparison to "Thirst," "JSA" is relatively warm and fuzzy.

He spent the next four years exploring the futility of revenge in his brutal "Vengeance" trilogy.

Critics generally recognize "Oldboy" (winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004, when Tarantino was on the jury) as the best of the trilogy. The story of a man imprisoned for 15 years without explanation, then suddenly released and told he has five days to figure out why he was locked up, "Oldboy" will grab you by the throat (or the necktie) from the opening seconds and never let go. It features some cringe-inducing violence and a complicated, fast-moving plot that mirrors the protagonist's confusion.

If you love that film, follow it up with its precursor, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," a slower and sadder movie about organ theft, kidnapping, and revenge, in which horrible things happen (often by accident) to good people.

Finally, finish the trilogy with "Lady Vengeance," which mixes kidnapping and imprisonment, has guest appearances from the cast of the first two vengeance movies, and concludes, for once, with the possibility of redemption.

Park said he has tried to avoid writing and treating his female characters in the patriarchal way that Hitchcock did, and he appeared visibly touched when a woman in the "Thirst" audience told him that she found "Lady Vengeance" to be "beautiful."

Indeed, Park has an eye for color and light, and uses it to create a cohesive and resonant mise-en-scene in each of his films. His true gift, however, may be presenting beautiful images in well-told stories without neglecting his characters.

Sat Freedman, a deputy public defender in Honolulu, is a HIFF volunteer and assists with programming films. He moderated Park Chan-wook's appearance for HIFF.