‘El Conde’ Review: Pablo Larraín Sinks His Teeth into Pinochet but Doesn’t Draw Blood

Pablo Larraín’s primary mode is deconstruction, of everything from genre to myth to ideology. But given its intensely subjective point of view, El Conde shares more in common with Spencer and Jackie than the filmmaker’s earlier investigations into Chile’s tumultuous past, Post Mortem and No. The film seeks to dispense with the historical record and imagine what happens behind closed doors. Of course, there’s one important difference here: El Conde is certainly no stickler for verisimilitude, as the Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) of this film is a morose vampire fasting from blood in order to ease himself into death.

That premise might suggest that Larraín has sympathy for the devil, but El Conde is no hagiography. The film renders Pinochet as an aging, ever-prattling child of sorts, who no longer wants to live in a Chile that has no appreciation for all his “great work,” nor deal with some pesky investigations into his massive wealth. Which isn’t to say that El Conde is particularly incisive or subtle either. If you find yourself hoping that there will be ambiguity in metaphor, the incessant and largely unnecessary Planet Earth-like narration (by Stella Gonet) neatly summarizes, with little variation from one incident to the next, that Pinochet is a literal immortal vampire that must feed off the blood of innocent people to keep living.

Larraín sets the film in the immediate years after Pinochet’s death, except here the dictator has decamped to his massive desert estate. Transylvania this is not, but El Conde is shot in smoky, high-contrast black and white that more or less gets the point across that, even in immortality, Pinochet has effectively sold his soul for power and only received grime and isolation in return.

When reports surface that someone has been stealing and eating the hearts of young women across Santiago, Pinochet’s five children come to visit, suspecting their retired father is behind the carnage. Within the walls of Dad’s hideout, they find that his loyal butler, Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), might be harboring secrets of his own, and that a young accountant and nun, Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger), is seducing their father. After this point, the film suggests a Hammer-produced episode of Succession, with each character playing a poor game of chess in a desperate, clamoring desire to hang on to some shred of money and power.

That isn’t an uninteresting proposition, but it quickly becomes clear that El Conde has nothing new to say about Pinochet. Worse, the film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of the dictator’s legacy. Throughout, Larraín and co-writer Guillermo Calderón are eager to show, across scenes in which characters run down Pinochet’s laundry list of bad deeds, that they’ve got their subject’s number. But it’s difficult to shake that El Conde exists primarily for the unwashed, and that its characters sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes—or, at least, information from Pinochet’s Wikipedia page.

Luckily, El Conde’s style makes a more lasting impression. As in Spencer, the film conjures a claustrophobic, almost nauseating sense of space. Luchsinger, whose cherubic, wide-eyed face recalls nothing less than Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, is often captured pushing up against forces much bigger than her own. And in a sequence where a newly minted vampire learns to fly for the first film, El Conde latches onto a magnetic—that is, evocative—picture of how evil is passed on. The moment is so memorably ethereal, weird and unsettling in equal measure, that it may just make you resent even more all the overly literal ways in which the film goes about reiterating how vampiric life sustains itself.