El Conde review - Pablo Larran's horror-satire pitches Pinochet as a vampire

Venice film festival: Macabre alt-history faces the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront their past, with graphic-novel energy and directness

Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 31 Aug 2023 10.30 EDT

The undead forces of fascism swoop vampirically through our 21st-century global twilight – the fascists once covertly supported by the western powers as a bulwark against communism, and now proclaiming themselves as a vital bulwark against Islamism, wokeism etc.

Chilean director Pablo Larraín concerns himself with this international fascism, and some fascism closer to home, in his boisterously macabre, ultraviolent, single-note horror-satire El Conde, or The Count. It’s entertaining in a Spitting Image way, if endowed with a certain willed political naivety, shot almost entirely in sepulchral black-and-white: powerful at the beginning and end, and sagging in the middle.

Larraín’s earlier movies such as Post Mortem, No and The Club are variously about how the gruesome dictator General Augusto Pinochet lives on and on in Chile, past his retirement in 1990 and his death in 2006, as so many of Chile’s prosperous classes continue to struggle with their memories of how they did well under his rule.

Now Larraín makes this idea a gothic reality by turning Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) an 250-year-old vampire who came of age as a reactionary bloodsucker in the French military during the Revolution, obsessively loyal to Marie Antoinette, whose head he loots from her grave and carries with him in his personal effects. He drifts across Europe and, as Dracula wound up in Yorkshire, Pinochet arrived in Santiago, Chile, joined its army and rose to grisly prominence in the 1973 coup, whose 50-year anniversary this movie avowedly marks.