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For one reason or another, Vampire stories seem to have come right back into vogue in recent years. Be it the teenage angst of Twilight, the sexy southern gothic of True Blood, or the chilly brooding of Let The Right One In, these days there seems to be a vampire to please everyone.

If all of these diverse spins on the Vampire myth share anything in common, it is in the sympathetic approach to the bloodsuckers themselves. Gone is the idea of the vampire as villain, a foreign and exotic devil lurking in a Central European castle. The modern Vampire is more likely to be an urban outsider, inhabiting a world much like our own, persecuted by society and often reluctant to prey on any but the most cruel and ignorant of humankind.

The latest addition to this canon comes from South Korea's master of extreme grand guignol, Park Chan-Wook; the supreme stylist behind such stomach-churning masterpieces as Oldboy and Sympathy For Mister Vengeance. Having shared the Jury Prize at this years Cannes, this new film is perhaps his most elegant, macabre and measured work yet – that is, until an overblown final thirty minutes threatens to overpower the subtleties of what has come before.

Thirst follows Sang-hyun, a Catholic priest, working in a hospital for the sick and dying in South Korea. Experiencing a crisis of faith, he volunteers to a mission in East Africa, taking part in a near suicidal experiment, where he is infected with a deadly virus. Sang-hyun is denied his martyrdom when he is brought back from near death with a blood transfusion and returns to South Korea, feted as a miracle worker. But on his return, he begins to notice worrying transformations – an aversion to sunlight necessitates that he cover his face in bandages; an overpowering thirst for blood forces him to siphon it off from the veins of a coma victim; and his long dormant sexual desire is awakened, causing him to beat his erection with a stick in an attempt to control himself.

After successfully curing the cancer of her malingering son, Sang-hyun is urged by the grotesque Madame Ra to take part in regular Mah-Jong sessions at their apartment. It is here that he meets Tae-Joo, the beautiful wife of Madame Ra's sickly son, who is humiliated and treated as a near-slave by the ghastly family. Tae-Joo is desperate for a way out of her life of servitude – each night she runs barefoot through the streets to exorcise her frustration – and, just as Sang-hyun's is able to smell her menstrual blood, she quickly picks up on his attraction to her and encourages it. Soon, the pair develop a sexual obsession for each other, and Tae-Joo submits to vampirism also. However, their blood lust is markedly different. Sang-hyun refuses to kill to feed, instead negotiating with potential suicides and robbing blood banks – for him his vampirism is a crisis of faith. Tae-Joo on the other hand is thrilled by her role as a predator, relishing the hunt as much as the kill – for her, vampirism is the ultimate escape from years of bondage.

Like all of Park Chan-Wook's films, Thirst is packed with extraordinary moments: the startling montage when Sang-hyun first experiences his symptoms brilliantly focuses the eye and the ear on the minutiae of his heightened senses; the murder of Tae-Joo's husband on a moonlight lake - and his subsequent haunting of the guilty couple - is executed with Hitchcockian bravado; and the scene in which Sang-hyun leaps over tall buildings with Tae-Joo in his arms, the camera focussing on her intense excitement, immediately connects us to her desire for freedom.

For two hours Thirst builds an intense and noirish atmosphere of amour fou, elegantly exploring Sang-hyun's spiritual and sexual struggle with all the attendant themes of blood, guilt, sickness and disease. The production design, cinematography and sound are as effective as ever (the slurpy-sucking feeding sounds, high up in the mix, make you forget that we never see fangs on these vampires.). However, the final reel feels over indulgent, as if Park Chan-Wook just can't resist a final flurry of deranged, queasy body horror. This submission to the extremities of the director's trademark blackly comic brutality significantly dilutes the emotional impact of Sang-hyun's journey– but with filmmaking this fluent and stylish, it is easy to forgive an eccentric master the odd indulgent flourish.