“El Conde” centers on Augusto Pinochet, who is not dead but an aged vampire. After living 250 years in this world, he has decided to die once and for all.
It isn’t easy to make a vampire movie. Count Dracula alone holds the Guinness World Record for the most portrayed literary figure on screen, racking up an impressive 538 appearances as of 2015. Since the time of “Nosferatu” (1922) and “Dracula” (1931), vampirism has become such a household concept that its various tropes now tend to go without saying; films like “El Conde” can safely assume their audiences are already familiar with the rules of sunlight and holy water, which allows them to skip straight to the meat of the material. It’s a great convenience, but it comes at a price – when everyone knows the story you’re trying to tell, what can possibly be left to say?
For a while now, the answer has largely been to place it in the hands of “auteur” filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula” (1992) or Taika Waitii’s “What We Do in the Shadows” (2014). The latest to take on the challenge is Pablo Larráin, best known to Western audiences for his avant-garde and controversial biopics “Jackie” (2016) and “Spencer” (2021). In a surprising turn, however, his “El Conde” adapts the vampire myth with more care to authenticity than his treatments of either Kennedy or Diana, “playing straight” the demonic legend as best as one reasonably could.
There is minimal genre-postmodernism to be found here, with the film’s grainy black-and-white tones harkening directly back to Bela Lugosi’s iconic rendition and its titular Count playing all the hits you’d expect from a classic Gothic tale. Like the 500-odd before him, our vampire drinks blood to retain his eternal youth, bites necks to spread his curse, and can fly in a formation best described as bat-like. There can be no doubt that Larráin has a deep admiration for this mythology, which is incredibly fortunate when it becomes clear just how neat a fit this 30s-style is for his trademark pans and dollies. His sets in “El Conde” are designed in the same stagey fashion as Universal’s ’30s studio lots and embellished with his signature swooping, leering camera that keeps us at a distance, like voyeurs of a midnight show.
The biographical elements of “El Conde”’s subject, Augustus Pinochet, aka the longest-reigning dictator in Chilean history, are treated with significantly less accuracy. Under Larráin’s pen, Pinochet is revealed to be himself an immortal bloodsucker, dying and returning since at least the French Revolution, which is recreated in unforgettably grisly detail for a sequence early in the film. In justifying his mythologization of one of history’s real villains, Larráin has argued that in dying before facing justice, Pinochet “remains like a dark stain on our society that reminds us every day how broken we are and how divided we are.” In Larráin’s eyes, Pinochet’s cult of personality has given him undying influence, and what better story is there to tackle such a belief system than that of Mr. Stoker’s seductive but toxic creation?
The film resulting from this vision is a strange blend of broad comedy and bitter, nihilistic horror, emphasising at once the pathetic theatrics of the Count while also challenging any misconception that this is a man worthy of leadership, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. As far as the former is concerned, “El Conde” is a gleefully mischievous and utterly silly triumph. Sweeping shots of a bat-like Pinochet gliding over the city at traffic speed, no swifter than the average commuter, never fail to get a laugh, while 87-year-old star Jamie Vadell proves deftly self-aware in portraying Pinochet’s tendency to flirt with much younger and sharper women, dialing up the cringe factor to a level worthy of sitcom legend.
Where “El Conde” stumbles slightly is in its more pointed critiques of the vampire at its center. The second act, in particular, can be weighed down by scene after scene of monologuing schemers and palace intrigue as Larráin endeavors to portray the decrepit household in which Pinochet has enshrined himself. Unfortunately, the ensemble around Pinochet – namely his ambitious wife, devoted butler, and greedy children – is consistently less interesting than the ghoul himself. In taking center-stage for so much of the middle hour, they not only shift the story away from the vampiric iconography with which Larráin excels, but they also make the aging dictator far too appealing a presence by comparison, which feels counter-intuitive to the script’s ultimate goals.
Whether or not “El Conde” succeeds in satirizing Augustus Pinochet beyond putting him in the goofy cloaks and neckties of ye olde vampires is debatable, but what isn’t is Larráin’s masterful use of genre trappings to drive a familiar narrative, which is undoubtedly and distinctively the work of an auteur. “El Conde” thrives above many in the vampire canon because its storyteller sees these tropes primarily as tools to create what might be the culminating work of his career thus far. The production is full of camp cheek in all the same ways as “Ema” (2019) or “No” (2012) while taking a bold and defiantly opinionated stance on a figure of real controversy in the vein of Jackie or Spencer. The film doesn’t quite balance all of these threads as elegantly as it could, with clunkier stretches between its grander moments, but what cannot be denied is this: there is no vampire movie quite like “El Conde,” and there is unlikely to be one again.
“El Conde” recently premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival,
and debuts on Netflix Friday, September 15th
