It’s September 15, 2023. A fan of Vampire Diaries enters the word “vampire” in the search field on the Netflix streaming service. There appears, decorated on the right and left by The Vampire Sisters Parts 1 to 3 Film about the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. His name is El Conde (The Count) and no, I’m not writing from the future. Moviepilot took me to the Venice Film Festival, but even our budget has limits.
The performance described above is arguably the most delightful thing about Pablo Larraín’s bloody gory satire horror. The director of Jackie and Spencer has put together a cinematic reckoning in black and white, which wants to beat the skeptical brain to a pulp with shocking images, like a vampire the skull of its victims.
The Netflix film features some extremely brutal horror images
Faces smashed in, hearts torn out, throats bitten – in the first third of El Conde, real history is expanded to include brutal horror film images. Pinochet flies! No one says that in the film, and yet El Conde feels like Pablo Larraín is yelling the phrase in our ears himself. Pinochet devours a human heart! Pinochet bites a young woman’s neck! And so forth.
Netflix
Pinochet flies!
The narrator, who is at times dripping with sarcasm, does the rest so that we never miss one thing: we are dealing with one in El Conde brave to do satire. But as soon as it comes down to telling the story and not just shocking, the film scrapes the limits it has set itself.
Nunsploitation meets vampire movie
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, where he remained until 1990 with US support. Larraín transforms Pinochet’s long cultural and political shadow into a horror motif, he portrays the ex-dictator (Jaime Vadell) as a phantom of the night. Tired of the lives he has taken from thousands, this vampire longs for his death.
When he meets an accountant/nun (Paula Luchsinger) who is supposed to bring him down, he gains new momentum. Meanwhile, his greedy children grab his fortune.
Netflix
El Conde
The (fictitious) vampirism of the ex-autocrat serves as a framework. The accountant, who asks the family about their crooked business, makes herself comfortable in it. This part of the film gets thanks to his cynical dialogues about deceit and cruelty increasingly monotonous and works through the dark history of Chile from a safe distance. Larraín lays bare the greed of the Pinochet clan, but has already said it all with the film’s vampiric opening images.
A Tarantino comparison suggests itself
Another problem: the director can’t get out of his art house skin. Instead of producing genuine, repulsive horror in a consistent genre guise, El Conde draws on elaborate panoramas and picturesque images of death. This is more The Witch than Nosferatu or even Coppola’s Dracula. You’re praising a Quentin Tarantinowho in his rewriting of history in Inglourious Basterds met Hitler and Goebbels with brazen detachment instead of smiling at them from afar.
Creepy and sometimes funny you could call El Conde, but ultimately the Pinochet-as-a-vampire gag turns into a prison from which the film does not escape.
El Conde will be released on the Netflix streaming service on September 15th.