Léalo en español
Artists have always grappled with staring into the heart of darkness, with conveying the evil nature of mankind at its worst. With El Conde, director and co-writer Pablo Larraín takes a monster — specifically, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — and creates a monster movie. The layers of satire and dysfunctional-family comedy that surround this demon serve to accentuate, rather than diminish, his many crimes against humanity.
It’s a bit of a radical shift for the Chilean-born Larraín, whose recent films Jackie and Spencer were compassionate portraits of women thrust into the spotlight by virtue of their marriages to powerful men. There’s no compassion here for Pinochet and the genocidal larceny that marked his 17-year reign of terror, though; Larraín refuses to avert his gaze from Pinochet’s sins or from the rotting corruption that infects the dictator’s family, his servants, or even the thoroughly complicit Catholic Church.
We learn from the English-language narrator (Stella Gonet) that the Pinochet’s blood-soaked existence spans back centuries to a time when he was a young French soldier named Pinoche (Clemente Rodriguez); the events of 1789 drove him to fake his own death and spend the next several centuries fighting on behalf of oppressors and against revolutionaries around the globe. (His love of dictators goes so deep that he lovingly licks Marie Antoinette’s blood from the blade of the guillotine before stealing her head from her crypt.)
By the late 20th century, Pinoche has established himself as the ruthless Pinochet (Jaime Vadell, Larraín’s Neruda), exploiting Chile with the support of his equally amoral wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) and their manservant Fyodor (Alfredo Castro, No), a White Russian Pinochet enslaved during the Russian Revolution. But now, Pinochet wants to die, and his grasping children (played by Catalina Guerra, Marcial Tagle, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, and Antonia Zegers) gather at the family’s decaying country manor to track down all of the money he stole over the decades, which they expect to receive as an inheritance.
One of his daughters hires an accountant to come in and wade through the books, but unbeknownst to them, numbers-cruncher Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger) is actually an undercover nun and vampire-hunter whose true agenda remains a mystery to the family, and at times even to herself. Carmencita seems attuned to the weaknesses and vices of every member of the household, but her purity and devotion to God clashes with the utter soullessness of Pinochet. “She thinks she’s going to drive the devil out of me,” he observes at one point, “but there’s nothing there.”
Legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman, shooting in black and white, finds a visual tone that underscores both the horror and the comedy; his high-contrast imagery is as spare as the screenplay’s wit is dry and deadpan. And that screenplay never forgets that this is a monster movie: to have Pinochet merely suck blood in the traditional vampiric sense would be to undersell his barbarity, so Larraín has the undead dictator favor the consumption of human hearts, whether eaten whole or blended into visceral smoothies. Pinochet’s flights over Santiago (in full military regalia, with cape flapping behind him) are as elegant as his homicides are splattery.
The cast also understands the balance of tone here, with one foot in The Little Foxes and the other in an Edgar Allan Poe gothic. Vadell captures the essence of a withered brute who’s still capable of at least one more act of wretched excess, while Münchmeyer embodies the wicked ambition and snobbery of a woman who has lived her life supporting any despicable crime by her husband so long as it fueled her own social agenda. (Lucía, the narrator reminds us, was once a peasant, and now she is the kind of woman given to wearing mink coats indoors.) Gonet’s droll narration leads the film to an unexpected but delicious twist that underscores El Conde’s larger points about how power corrupts (or, perhaps, that it is the corrupt who always become powerful).
If there’s a standout here, however, it’s Luchsinger as an interloping bride of Christ who upends the clan’s well-laid plans. It’s rare when a single performance calls to mind both The Passion of Joan of Arc (Luchsinger has, apologies to Kim Carnes, Maria Falconetti eyes) and the TV series The Flying Nun, but Luchsinger brings those two divergent streams together with ease. Carmencita keeps the other characters off-balance, and Luchsinger accomplishes a similar feat for viewers.
It’s no easy thing to mine humor out of historical tragedy, but El Conde finds a zone that allows for rueful chuckles over humanity’s cruelty without ever being glib about Chile’s dark past. Larraín does his best to drive a stake into the heart of his homeland’s darkest chapter, even as he acknowledges that this scale of maleficence can never truly be extinguished.
Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenwriters: Gullermo Calderón and Pablo Larraín
Cast: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Catalina Guerra, Marcial Tagle, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, Antonia Zegers, and Stella Gonet
Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín, and Rocío Jadue
Executive producers: Cristian Donoso, Sergio Karmy
Director of photography: Ed Lachman
Production design: Alejandro Wise
Costume design: Muriel Parra
Editing: Sofía Subercaseaux
Music: Juan Pablo Ávalo and Marisol García
Sound: Juan Carlos Maldonado
Production companies: Netflix, Fabula
In Spanish and English
110 minutes