El Conde review – Pablo Larraín’s horror-satire pitches Pinochet as a vampire

The undead forces of fascism swoop vampirically through our 21st-century global twilight – the fascists once covertly supported by the western powers as a bulwark against communism, and now proclaiming themselves as a vital bulwark against Islamism, wokeism etc.

Chilean director Pablo Larraín concerns himself with this international fascism, and some fascism closer to home, in his boisterously macabre, ultraviolent, single-note horror-satire El Conde, or The Count. It’s entertaining in a Spitting Image way, if endowed with a certain willed political naivety, shot almost entirely in sepulchral black-and-white: powerful at the beginning and end, and sagging in the middle.

Larraín’s earlier movies such as Post Mortem, No and The Club are variously about how the gruesome dictator General Augusto Pinochet lives on and on in Chile, past his retirement in 1990 and his death in 2006, as so many of Chile’s prosperous classes continue to struggle with their memories of how they did well under his rule.

Now Larraín makes this idea a gothic reality by turning Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) an 250-year-old vampire who came of age as a reactionary bloodsucker in the French military during the Revolution, obsessively loyal to Marie Antoinette, whose head he loots from her grave and carries with him in his personal effects. He drifts across Europe and, as Dracula wound up in Yorkshire, Pinochet arrived in Santiago, Chile, joined its army and rose to grisly prominence in the 1973 coup, whose 50-year anniversary this movie avowedly marks.

He fakes his own death – there is a great moment when the corpse’s eyes flicker open during the lying in state – and continues to slake his thirst covertly, drifting drone-like above the teeming city streets, ready to pounce. But now he is bored, on the point of starving himself of sanguinary nourishments and finally ending it all. But first, he must settle up with his retinue: his ageing cantankerous wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) and bickering, mediocre grownup children, and his butler, a chillingly reactionary White Russian veteran Fyodor, played by the excellent Alfredo Castro, who I was half-expecting to play Pinochet himself. At any rate, he has some chilling dialogue sequences with his master, as they discuss how much they adored torturing dissidents and looting from the state.

These dependents have also agreed to a forensic inspection of the general’s papers to identify where he has hidden his looted millions so they can get hold of it – and this accountant is also, very bizarrely, a nun (played by Paula Luchsinger) who intends to exorcise him and purify his legacy, just as the Church is arguably doing with Pinochet in the real world.

The most showstopping supporting turn is one that is at first only given to us in voiceover: the narrative commentary from Pinochet’s biggest-ever fan. It would be unsporting to give away the identity of the undead speaker, though you’ll recognise who it is at once. But how about all those other vampires who helped the vampire Chilean general to power in 1973? Surely the tomb door will grind open to reveal the black-cloaked and fanged figure of Henry Kissinger (still with us as I write at the age of 100)? Richard Nixon? CIA chief Vernon Walters?

No. It’s just our narrator – although Madame Pinochet has a mug with Queen Elizabeth II on it. Well, a gothic fantasy about vampires is not the same as a documentary, although veterans of the 1973 coup may feel the film has missed out Americans in favour of more obvious targets. Having said this, the reductionism of this crazed alt-history mythology has a lot of graphic novel energy and directness, which the whole clotted central section about the butler and accountant/nun doesn’t quite. And the use of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the soundtrack is a bit route one. But this is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.

• El Conde screened at the Venice film festival; it is released in UK cinemas on 8 September, and on Netflix on 15 September.