El Conde asks if dictators are scarier than monsters
J. Oliver Conroy
Pablo Larrain is difficult to classify. The Chilean filmmaker is not a horror director, nor especially brooding or joyless, but themes and tones of horror often creep into his work. Several of his earlier films are set against the backdrop of the Chilean military dictatorship, often from the point of view of eccentric and relatively apolitical people — a morgue worker (Post Mortem), an obsessive John Travolta impersonator (Tony Manero), a slick ad man (No). His muses since then have included disgraced Catholic clergy (The Club) and a bloodstained Jackie Kennedy (Jackie). 2021’s Spencer depicted Christmas with the British royal family from Princess Diana’s eyes, in somewhat the way Clarice Starling might see Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill.
Larrain’s latest film, El Conde (The Count), is a horror film at its most explicit and literal, though one that is also a comedy of sorts and more head-scratching than scary. Shot mostly in black and white, with shades of Nosferatu, this winsomely odd and audacious movie invites us to imagine an alternate version of history in which Augusto Pinochet, the U.S.-supported military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was an actual vampire.
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Pinochet, we learn, is a bloodsucking former French counterrevolutionary who roamed the earth following Louis XVI’s death to settle in and eventually rule Chile. Most Chileans have no idea that the general is a vampire who prefers to be addressed in private as “Count” and whose immortality depends on a supply of human blood and flesh. (Fresh hearts are best, especially those of the young and tender, but he keeps some in a cellar freezer to be mixed in a blender into smoothies.) After faking his death in 2006, the aging Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is living in secret in a drafty compound on a wind-swept Patagonian island.
Pinochet’s small retinue includes his butler and immortal familiar (Alfredo Castro) — a White Russian Nazi and former anti-communist death squad leader — and his non-vampire wife (Gloria Munchmeyer) and children (Antonia Zegers, Amparo Noguera, Diego Munoz, Catalina Guerra, and Marcial Tagle), who are humiliated by their humbled circumstances and eager to recover the fortune Pinochet looted from Chile and hid around the world but is now having trouble finding.
Unhappy with his unflattering historical legacy, Pinochet is now saying he’d like to die for real; he’s made gestures toward adopting a vegetarian diet. His greedy family, concerned that he might die before ensuring their inheritance, recruit a bright-eyed Catholic nun who knows accounting (Paula Luchsinger) to help go through the books; the nun, and various of Pinochet’s entourage, are soon revealed to have their own agendas. Though mostly in Spanish, the film is narrated in English by a militantly pro-Pinochet British woman (Stella Gonet) whose identity, later revealed, is one of the film’s twists, though astute viewers will have guessed it.
El Conde is not interested in subtlety. It’s perilously on the nose — the dictator as literal bloodsucking parasite — and so gleefully mixing genres and tones can backfire, as Larrain no doubt knows. The approach is hardly without precedent, however: Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a black-and-white feminist-horror-Western about a female vampire hunting in a repressed and repressive Iran, comes to mind. Just as a black chador, in Amirpour’s eye, resembled a vampire’s cowl, Pinochet’s capes and army greatcoats lend themselves naturally to the prowling and fluttering of a latter-day Dracula. It helps that El Conde’s cinematography and set design are superb, with glorious shots of dark figures descending from the sky to alight on moonlit streets, or of Pinochet’s family, decked in furs and pearls, puttering around their ramshackle compound.
The larger risk, of course, is satirizing Pinochet as a supernatural ghoul when his regime’s historical crimes — which included rounding up and torturing people in a soccer stadium, assassinating exiles abroad, and “disappearing” people by dumping them from helicopters and planes into the sea — are already as evil and disturbing as anything a horror movie could capture. Although Chile is far from fully reconciled with its past, many films, including some of Larrain’s, have chillingly dramatized Pinochet’s violence without the need for embellishment. Last year’s 1976 (released in the U.S. as Chile ’76), about a middle-class Chilean housewife who agrees to hide a wounded fugitive, forged a Hitchcockian thriller from that very simple and plausible premise.
But there’s an argument for Larrain’s choice to embrace winking dark comedy, especially when reality — Pinochet died of old age in Chile without ever facing real justice, and was honored with a halfhearted military funeral — is itself absurd. What better captures the hypocrisies and rationalizations of dictators and their collaborators than the scenes of the fictionalized Count Pinochet and his family whining about their ungrateful former nation? Their propriety is untroubled by the Count’s violence, but they bristle at the notion that they’re thieves.
“Magical realism” is a quintessential Latin American genre. Here, Larrain draws on that playful tradition and perhaps adds a dash of the metatextual games and postmodernism of Borges and Roberto Bolano. I’m not sure it always completely works. There were times, watching El Conde, that I felt baffled, like someone not in on a joke. The film’s genre logic is also a bit confusing: the mechanics of why some people are vampires, and how vampires are killed, seemed hazy. For example, Pinochet does not seem threatened by daylight. If you’re left with a sense that it doesn’t totally make sense, maybe that’s the point.
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J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.