Larrain imagines Pinochet as a still-alive vampire in this darkly comic if sometimes absurd take on tackling national historical trauma—it doesn’t work that convincingly but one can admire the conceptual vision.

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Probably Pablo Larrain’s weirdest film to date in an enviable filmography that has got us thinking about Chilean national history in works like Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012), as well as reimaginations of famous historical figures from the 20^th century in Neruda (2016), Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). 

In El Conde (or ‘The Count’), the Chilean auteur imagines Augusto Pinochet as a still-alive vampire who just wants to die really. 

To ascertain his net worth, much of which had been embezzled, a nun disguised as an accountant pays a visit with an ulterior aim: to get rid of the Devil possessing the Chilean dictator. 

Shot in gloomy black-and-white, El Conde is darkly comic, and in fact, the humour is so black that it is not necessarily chucklish.

Instead, Larrain tackles national trauma (once again but now in a more absurd fashion) and asks the question: is it even possible to heal from all the brutality and grotesqueness of Pinochet’s iron rule?  In other words, can this ever-present vampiric man with a thirst for blood just go away? 

“I don’t want to live another 250 years.”

El Conde is certainly a creative take on how history, politics and religion can potentially work via a mythologizing mode. 

This mythologization also comes on the heels of another Latin American film—Alejandro G. Inarritu’s surreal if underwhelming Bardo (2022), also another Netflix Original, albeit one that is more personal. 

There are several shots of Pinochet flying stealthily in the sky, much like Batman—a literal human vampire bat really.  These are some of the most poetic scenes in Larrain’s body of work.  While his film doesn’t ultimately work that convincingly, one can admire the conceptual vision behind it. 

Now we need an American filmmaker bold enough to give a similar treatment to one of theirs, with a still-alive Abraham Lincoln out for a good hunt.

Grade: B

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