Metacritic reviews

Delightfully twisted, Thirst Street takes the ideas of desire, romantic longing and desperation — desperation as the world’s worst cologne — and bathes it in a sheen of frosty colors, genuine vulnerability and sardonic unkindness.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

It’s a portrait of obsession that doesn’t caricaturize nor ridicule, an empathetic account of desire and its inherent limitations, as well as an opaque psychological study that falls in line with life’s myriad mysteries.

Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.

Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.

There’s not much in the way of bruising insight into the makeup of a deteriorating personality, but for a compact spin through well-trod fields of lustful, sad-mad blindness, “Thirst Street” has its share of disreputably perverse pleasures.

Vivid and mordant, Thirst Street imperfectly defines its lead, but makes her journey distinct.

Silver infuses some novelty into his Perils Of Pauline narrative, thanks to an extreme performance by Burdge, who plays the credulous lovesick naif to the hilt.

While Burdge's dogged commitment to the role commands admiration, Gina's obtuse, masochistic behavior keeps us from investing in her as a character spiraling out of control.

Thematically shallow but stylistically rich, Thirst Street is best enjoyed with a hint of its heroine’s willfully superficial vision.