History's Greatest Monster: El Conde (Pablo Larraín, 2023)
Finally, the Nosferatu-Eve 6 mashup we were all craving.
There are times when I wish I could give a movie two write-ups: One for the thing it’s trying to be, and another for the thing it actually is.
El Conde — a movie in which Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is an immortal vampire lingering on past his supposed death -- is sort of a mess. It’s horror, it’s comedy, it’s Knives Out, it’s Succession, it’s (confusingly, but sincerely) The Passion of Joan of Arc sometimes. There are a lot of little spinning wheels and fidgets and extraneous parts to this movie and I’m not sure all of them exactly work.
If I had seen this movie at any point before late November of 2024, who knows? I might not recommend it. But in November of 2024, here’s what the movie was: A story about how a dictator is a monster who never goes away. Even if you think he’s gone, even if you think he’s dead, he’s always waiting just out of sight. The country, having given rise to him, will bear the stain of him forever, and fascism will always lurk under its surface, waiting to bloom.
In late November of 2024, that felt like an important movie. It still does. So here we are.
So, the plot: Pinochet, as we all know, is an immortal vampire. In a brief, Anne-Ricean prologue, we learn how he got that way. It involves witnessing the French Revolution and becoming so besotted with Marie Antoinette that he licks her blood off the blade of a guillotine. This same experience gives him an undying hatred of socialism, as you would expect.