111 min | R | September 8, 2023 | Netflix
Augusto Pinochet never died. He is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire hiding in the Chilean wilderness, sick of life and ready to stop drinking blood. Then his children show up to fight over the money he stole.
Pablo Larraín turns the dictator into a literal monster. The Count is Augusto Pinochet, a vampire who faked his death and retreated to a crumbling estate at the end of the world. He has lived through the French Revolution and decided to let himself die, mostly out of boredom and wounded pride at being remembered as a thief rather than a hero. His heirs descend on the compound to divide the looted fortune, and a young accountant arrives to audit the blood money. The film is about how a country metabolizes a tyrant who refuses to be buried and how greed outlives every ideology that pretends to justify it.
Jaime Vadell plays the Count as a withered aristocrat who flies over Santiago in his cape and harvests hearts in a blender. He carries the exhaustion of a man who has outlived his own atrocities and resents that nobody thanks him for them. Gloria Münchmeyer plays Lucía, his wife, with a cold appetite for a turning of her own. Paula Luchsinger plays Carmencita, the accountant and would-be exorcist, with wide-eyed fervor that curdles into something else. Alfredo Castro plays Fyodor the butler with a loyalty that runs deeper and stranger than service. The performances treat the absurd premise as documented fact, and that straight-faced commitment is what makes the satire bite.
Larraín wrote the script with Guillermo Calderón and shoots in stark black and white through cinematographer Edward Lachman. The images quote Murnau and Dreyer directly, with high-contrast compositions and a flying caped silhouette lifted from silent horror. Lachman lights the estate like a haunted house and the floating attack sequences like nightmares pulled from German Expressionism. The decision to render a fascist as a Nosferatu figure is not decoration. It locates the horror of the dictatorship in a visual grammar that predates and outlasts the man himself.
The film is a political cartoon that takes its own logic seriously enough to draw blood. Larraín has spent his career circling the wound of Pinochet’s Chile, and here he stops dramatizing the history and starts desecrating the corpse. The narration delivers a late twist about who has been telling this story, and it reframes the whole project as an indictment that reaches past Chile. El Conde argues that the worst men do not die. They get reborn, richer, somewhere else, ready to feed again.