El Conde
Starring Jaime Vadell, Alfredo Castro and Paula Luchsinger
Rated MA15+
3.5/5
El Conde (Spanish for “The Count”) is a darkly funny, historically-conscious Chilean horror film marred by needless narration.
Tired of eternal life, the vampire Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell), formerly the dictator of Chile, meets with his five children to discuss their inheritance.
El Conde’s witty dialogue and squabbling, morally grey performances explore Pinochet’s despotic legacy and bring the complicated bonds of family to a macabre extreme. Pinochet is torn between immortality and the relief of death, and his children love him but want him dead for his money. Paula Luchsinger conveys remarkable grace and subtle madness as a nun sent to kill Pinochet under the cover of an audit.
The narrative has a strong current of scheming and treachery on multiple fronts, and Pinochet’s grizzly hunts, with a soaring Vivaldi score and Pinochet literally soaring through the city for fresh victims, have an ironic grandeur: a dictator as a monster of the night in full uniform.
With its dark humour, class themes and focus on an aristocratic vampire whose world has left him behind, El Conde most closely resembles Paul Morrissey’s 1974 film Blood for Dracula.
El Conde’s biggest flaw is its obtrusive, incongruently posh British narration, which frequently explains things we can clearly see or infer in the scene. The narration provides some laughs – the almost Julia Childs-like commentary over Pinochet drinking a victim’s heart in a blender is one of the funniest moments of the year – and it sets up a late-film twist that you may find ingenious or infuriating; I’m somewhere in the middle. The film also peters out with an unsatisfying ending.
A gruesome, funny and cleverly-written horror film with unwelcome narration and a conclusion that may lose you, El Conde is streaming on Netflix.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
