A vampire sucking the blood from a tube inserted into a coma patient is just one of the outré spectacles in Park Chan-Wook’s latest epic.

A riff on Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, it won a prize — probably for sheer chutzpah — at Cannes this year.

Park is the South Korean director whose Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance showed him to be one of the wonders of the East.

Here, his central character, a Roman Catholic priest named Sang-Hyeon, struggles mightily with the forces of evil that have taken hold of him.

The priest (Song Kang-ho) has heroically submitted himself to a vaccine that could stop a deadly African virus in its tracks and finds himself covered in sores.

Almost dead, he is given a blood transfusion that keeps him alive but turns him into a vampire.

But he’s a bloodsucker with a difference, guilty and unhappily prey to overwhelming carnal desire. And there’s Tae-joo (Kim Ok-vin), a beautiful married woman, waiting to seduce him.

The bored and unsatisfied wife of a young man he once taught, she soon becomes a vampire too. Only she is not the least guilty about being on intimate terms with the seven deadly sins, and plans for them to kill her husband.

Meanwhile, the priest tries to cope with his affliction as best he can, which is none too well.

Park’s storyline takes so many twists and turns and evinces so many changes of mood that it can’t be said to be a complete success. It is, in fact, overlong and grossly uneven.

But Song Kang-ho, one of Korea’s superstars, is so good as the riven priest forced into extremes and the film itself is directed, shot and produced with such flair that no one could deny it entirely.

Certainly the Cannes jury didn’t, giving it a share of the Jury Prize with Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank.

Park is clearly an exceptional director capable of being weirdly funny, quirkily fantastical, brutal and sexy, sometimes at one and the same time. There’s no one quite like him. Not even David Cronenberg or George Romero.