Jaime Vadell stands between Dracula and Lear as vampire-turned-dictator Augusto Pinochet.
In 2012, Chilean director Pablo Larrain achieved international fame with his political drama No, a documentary-style look at the 1988 advertisement campaign that deposed dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now, ten years later, Larrain returns to the subject of Pinochet with El Conde, a film telling the story of the dictator’s final days, but with a brand-new twist: what if Augusto Pinochet was actually a 250-year-old vampire?
Premiering at the 80th Venice Film Festival, the Netflix Original earned writers Pablo Larrain and Guillermo Calderón the Best Screenplay award. The film centers around former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell), an aging vampire who’s just decided to give up immortality and finally die. Lured by the promise of a vast inheritance, Pinochet’s five children travel to his remote Patagonian ranch to wait like vultures for the dictator to kick the much-delayed bucket. Throw in a steamy affair, a mysterious butler, and an exorcist/nun/accountant, and the film you end up with is a hypnotically beautiful blend of Nosferatu and Knives Out.
Over the film’s tidy 110-minute runtime, Larrain deftly capitalises on the most potent elements of the premise. The film takes full advantage of the humour inherent to the setup, but never at the expense of moments of genuine horror and beauty. It’s a dark comedy, an impressive vampire flick, and – since this is Pablo Larrain we’re talking about – a substantial political critique. Larrain’s comparison of Pinochet’s literal blood-sucking tendencies with his political parasitism is mostly understated, allowing the over-the-top narrative and earnest politics to coexist rather peacefully. For instance, in an effort to unravel the inheritance, the accountant-nun levies a series of true-to-life allegations of fraud and embezzlement against his children, serving to remind us that while Pinochet may be the vampire around here, he is by no means the only leech.
What’s perhaps most impressive about the film is its originality. By now it’s obvious that Larrain has a deep interest in Pinochet and his family’s seventeen-year rule of Chile; prior to El Conde, three of Larrain’s previous films had something to do with his regime. Despite that, four films in, Larrain has yet to run out of meaningful things to say or original perspectives from which to say them.
Each of Larrain’s Pinochet films has approached the subject of the dictator from a different angle, rarely ever portraying him head-on. In fact, El Conde is the first of Larrain’s films (and according to him, one of the first films ever) to depict Pinochet using anything other than archival footage. All of his previous films talked around Pinochet; Tony Manero was set in the slums during Pinochet’s regime, and No followed an advertising executive working to end Pinochet’s rule. Larrain attributes this choice to a sense of difficulty confronting the memory of the Pinochet era.
“[Chileans] still feel broken by his figure, because he’s not really dead in our culture,” the director explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “In Argentina, for example…they took those criminals and put them in jail. That somehow created a national pact that this should never happen again. We never had that in Chile, so his figure remained very vivid and alive.”
For Larrain, it was this sense that Pinochet was still “alive” culturally that invited the likening to a vampire. Not only does the fantasy permit Larrain to offer a damning criticism of Pinochet’s governance, but it also creates a narrative device capable of exploring the history of Chilean fascism; since vampire-Pinochet is more than two centuries old, we can see his origins (and the origins of his political movement) beginning in 18th-century France, moving through Haiti and Russia towards South America.
In all, Larrain’s newest effort offers some striking visuals, brilliant performances, and a whole lot of food for thought. Even if El Conde doesn’t drive a stake in the heart of Pinochet’s memory, it at least opens the coffin on a new kind of cultural discussion.
“El Conde” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and was released internationally on Netflix on September 15.
The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Chile license. Attribution: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional