‘El Conde’ Review: His Bite Is Worse

Pablo Larraín’s black-and-white horror spoof “El Conde” is based on a ferocious sight gag: the previous dictator Augusto Pinochet hovering into the evening on a quest for human blood. Military cape flapping about his thighs, Pinochet flies together with his again as straight as an early Superman serial — a tip-off that Larraín (“Jackie,” “Spencer”) wants the viewers to play alongside together with his cheeky reimagining of the despot as a 250-year-old vampire.

This Pinochet, performed with imperious cruelty by Jaime Vadell, was as soon as a rebel-eating French royalist who sailed to South America in the hunt for recent meat. It’s a comic book premise — what, is that this a part of the “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” prolonged universe? — besides Larraín is barely half-laughing. History’s Pinochet oversaw the execution or disappearance of hundreds of Chileans. Larraín’s model of the person did that, too, with only one tweak: He blends his victims right into a smoothie.

The director has been sharpening his instruments for this confrontation. Born in Santiago three years after Pinochet seized energy in 1973, Larraín earned early acclaim from the interval items “Tony Manero” (2009), “Post Mortem” (2012) and the Oscar-nominated “No” (2013), a trilogy of satires that used Pinochet as an unseen boogeyman. The director shifted his consideration past Chile with two psychodramas that punctured the iconography of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana and turned political movie star right into a waking nightmare. He’s circled residence, he has mentioned in interviews, as a result of he believes his nation stays divided — and haunted — by not simply Pinochet’s crimes but in addition his impunity. The ex-president efficiently dodged trial till his loss of life in 2006. And Larraín has resurrected him to pull him into the sunshine.

Our setting is the current the place we discover Pinochet hiding out in Patagonia, a shivery excuse for exaggerated mists and merciless winds that howl beneath each scene. (Ed Lachman’s gothic cinematography pairs effectively with Juan Pablo Ávalo and Marisol García’s violent strings.) The movie begins as a sequence of dialogue-light flashbacks: Pinochet licks Marie Antoinette’s blood from a guillotine; he usurps the birthday of his spouse, Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer), by faking a coronary heart assault; he struggles to play useless whereas a protester spits on his coffin. At first, the dehydrated vampire is simply too thirsty to do greater than reminisce. While inert, he’s lavished with adoration by his Nazi butler (Alfredo Castro) and the British narrator (Stella Gonet) who does her bloody greatest to bludgeon the viewers into agreeing that Pinochet is a nationwide hero.

Larraín and his longtime writing accomplice Guillermo Calderón are delighted to place a Hammer horror spin on scenes that time towards the info as usually as they fib. Caught with a corpse in an 18th-century brothel, the younger vampire makes use of the identical protection the actual Pinochet gave when requested if he headed Chile’s secret police: “I don’t remember, but it’s not true. And if it were true, I don’t remember.” The line will get fun, however the stinger is our consciousness that we’d moderately grapple with Pinochet’s predations as camp than somber docu-reality.

The plot doesn’t kick in till Pinochet’s 5 grasping grownup kids arrive at his rural property for his or her reduce of his fortune. They’re aggrieved that he refuses to die, and equally piqued that he squirreled his cash in so many hidden accounts that they want a monetary whiz, an inquisitive nun named Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), to uncover his thousands and thousands. Carmen’s Joan of Arc crop is a clue she considers the household’s mortal members to be bloodsucking parasites.

There are solely so some ways to serve the movie’s simply digestible metaphor. We get it: Most people are merely chum for the elites. Just because the joke is starting to put on skinny, Larraín expands this universe with a shock cameo (think about it his tackle “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man”) that will get a giggle plus a realizing nod of shock. But whereas the filmmaker has the gall to caricature tyranny, he’s too cynical, or too sincere, to wrap up “El Conde” with a satisfying decision. Larraín has lastly confronted his monster — however he can’t convey himself to drive a stake by his coronary heart.

El Conde
Rated R for ghastly spurts of black-and-white blood. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.