In a few days, an abysmal horror satire that, much like Tarantino, rewrites history will launch on Netflix. The Pinochet film from Spencer director Pablo Larraín premiered in Venice.
It’s September 15, 2023, and a fan of Vampire Diaries enters the word “vampire” into the search box on the streaming service Netflix. There, adorned right and left by The Vampire Sisters Parts 1 through 3, appears a film about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. It’s called El Conde (The Count) and no, I’m not writing from the future. Moviepilot got me to the Venice Film Festival, but even our budget has limits.
The above performance is unquestionably the most delightful thing about Pablo Larraín’s extremely gory horror satire. The director of Jackie and Spencer, in fact, has crafted a cinematic reckoning in black and white that wants to beat your skeptical brain to a pulp with shock imagery, like a vampire beats the skull of its victims.
In the Netflix movie offers some extremely brutal horror images
Faces smashed in, hearts ripped out, throats bitten – the first third of El Conde adds brutal horror movie imagery to real history. Pinochet is flying! No one in the film says that, and yet El Conde feels as if Pablo Larraín is personally shouting the phrase in our ears. Pinochet devours a human heart! Pinochet bites a young woman’s neck! And so on.
Pinochet flies!
The narrator, at times dripping with sarcasm, does her part to ensure that at no point do we miss one thing: we are dealing with a bold satire in El Conde. But as soon as it gets down to storytelling and not just shocking, the film pushes its self-imposed limits.
Nunsploitation meets vampire movie
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet putsched his way to power in Chile, where he remained until 1990 with U.S. support. Larraín transforms Pinochet’s long cultural as well as political shadow into a horror motif, fashioning the ex-dictator (Jaime Vadell) as a phantom of the night. This vampire is tired of the life he has taken from thousands and longs for his death.
When he meets an accountant/nun (Paula Luchsinger) to bring him down, he gains new vigor. Meanwhile, his greedy children grab his fortune.
El Conde
The ex-autocrat’s (fictional) vampirism serves as framing. The accountant, who quizzes the family about their crooked dealings, makes herself at home in it. This part of the film becomes increasingly monotonous thanks to its cynical dialogue about deceit and cruelty, working away at Chile’s dark history from a safe distance. Larraín exposes the greed of the Pinochet clan, but has said it all with the film’s vampiric first images.
A Tarantino comparison suggests itself
Another problem: The director can’t get out of his arthouse skin. Instead of producing genuine, repulsive horror in consistent genre garb, El Conde retreats to artful panoramas and picturesque death imagery. This is more The Witch than Nosferatu or even Coppola’s Dracula. One praises a Quentin Tarantino who, in his rewriting of history in Inglourious Basterds, confronts Hitler and Goebbels with brazen aloofness instead of smiling at them from afar.
Creepy and sometimes funny, El Conde can be called that, but ultimately the Pinochet-as-vampire gag turns into a prison from which the film cannot escape.
