El Conde [2023]

 In Pablo Larraín’s grisly, hyperbolic, farcical and pungently satirical horror-comedy El Conde, the despotic former Chilean dictator is both literally and metaphorically a hideously decrepit, blood-sucking and heart-chomping vampire. Made as a zany overlap between German expressionism, bawdy humour and political absurdism – and deliberately as an exercise in lowbrow grotesquerie to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1973 coup – the film recalled two thematic tropes that’ve recurred in the filmmaker’s splendid oeuvre, viz. memories from the military dictatorship years (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) and unconventional stabs at biopics (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer). This oddball mix of aesthetic experimentation and narrative flippancy sees Pinochet – a French royalist who’d fought against the dissidents during the French Revolution, and finally fulfilled his lust of royal grandeur by illegally grabbing power in Chile – living a banished, ignominious existence since being kicked out of power, with his scheming wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra), and Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), his macabre White Russian butler who loved exterminating Communists. When his conniving kids get a hint of Pinochet’s suicidal tendencies – ironically, he’s more pissed at being called a thief than a murderer – they descend like a pack of vultures to seize his ill-gotten wealth. Meanwhile, a saucy Catholic nun straight out of a lurid Verhoeven slasher (Paula Luchsinger), in the guise of an accountant, arrives to track his dirty money trail and thereafter exorcize him. Shot in deliciously high-contrast B/W, filled with droll set-pieces, and imbued with a gothic and wintry atmosphere recalling earlier Scandinavian cinema, the freakish power struggle is dryly narrated – as it hilariously turns out – by the hawkish former British PM Margaret Thatcher, who isn’t just a fellow blood-sucking vampire but Pinochet’s borderline-incestuous mother too.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Horror

Language: Spanich/English

Country: Chile