What if Carl Theodor Dreyer made a film in which he’d combine elements from Succession and What We Do In The Shadows? It would probably look a bit like El Conde, Pablo Larraín’s wacky political satire, which has just arrived on Netflix after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Taking a temporary break from his impressionistic biopics (Jackie, Spencer, the future Maria), the director imagines military dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose specter still haunts recent Chilean history (and that of Larraín’s filmography: see Tony Manero or No), as if he were a 250-year-old vampire (Jaime Vadell) that staged his own death exactly because he wishes to finally rest in peace. When a series of mysterious crimes breaks out, whose victims are discovered with their hearts torn out, the five children of the former autocrat visit him to find out whether their father hasn’t changed his mind and wants to grow young again.

The tried ghost lives his life out in a decrepit farm in the middle of nowhere, next to a guillotine and a cemetery, accompanied by his sole, loyal butler, Fyodor (a “white” Russian that has killed many socialists in his lifetimes and had received the gift of immortality, in exchange) and by his wife, Lucia(Gloria Münchmeyer), who begs him every single day to bite her (“You were the queen of this desert, what more do you want?”, he replies). Shot in black and white by legendary director of photography Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven), the house in which he lives has something that looks like a crater in its living room, along with a secret escalator that leads to the underground tunnels that contain the true treasures of Pinochet – title deeds, historical souvenirs, and frozen hearts, ready to be mixed in a blender. 

The allegory of a vampire who travels across the centuries – a former French royalist who dedicated the rest of his life to fighting against any form of revolution and ended up in Chile, the country that he disparagingly calls the “land of fatherless peasants” – is a very fruitful premise to discuss the complicated history of absolutism in Southern America (which is also explored in novels that must have inspired Larraín, such as „I, the Supreme”, „El Señor Presidente” or „The Autumn of the Patriarch”). Stuck in an eternal purgatory, the dictator has no scruples whatsoever and has a deformed perspective of the past, talking about accusations of corruption and graft as if they were mere “errors in accounting”, self-assured in his belief that his legacy will be celebrated for generations to come. We see him visiting his palace every year to see if they have erected a bust of himself in the meantime. “Not yet”, says the mysterious voice-over, with its British accent.

There is an obvious voluptuousness to the way in which the director freely chooses from various genre codes (be it horror movies or superhero flicks) and mixes them together with a macabre sensibility – a cranium is squashed within the first five minutes, the head of Marie Antoinette plays an episodic role – with the humor contained within the lines of dialogue that are often delivered on a dry tone: when asked what he wishes to destroy in his new life, Pinochet immediately replies “The International Justice Court in the Hague”. However, behind this playful criss-crossing, one can sense the palpable anger of a profoundly politically engaged filmmaker, despairing at history’s tendency to learn nothing from its past mistakes.

This sense is nowhere as evident as it is in the scene where a strange character appears in the life of the Pinochet family –  Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), a nun made to resemble Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, bearing the holy mission to exorcize the dictator’s inner demons, bearing with herself the common anti-vampire arsenal. Under the guise of an accountant who has to put some order to the patriarch’s finances, Carmen The Vampire Slayer gets under Pinochet’s skin and subjects his children to a veritable interrogation, as she discovers all of the dirt under the carpet, like an investigative reporter: their petty attempts to get their hands on as much of their father’s riches as possible, their emotional immaturity, their self-victimizing tendency to complain that they’ve ended in the point of “surviving on donations” collected by their mother.

The deliciously energetic and chaotic finale brings together surprising characters and plot twists that come in a rapid-fire, giving the impression that one has just witnessed an elaborate prank, where caricatures and ghosts of the past are references to a present that is just as murky. In a time when one can turn on the television and see two dictators shaking hands “against imperialism”, this film hits the spot.

El Conde is available on Netflix.

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.