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El Conde (2023)

★★★ — El Conde (2023)

Pablo Larraín is no stranger to reimagining historical figures through a distorted lens, having previously put audiences inside the heads of Jackie Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) and Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021), so a surrealist horror-satire centred on Augusto Pinochet fits neatly into that pattern. El Conde was produced by Larraín's own Chilean company Fábula and acquired by Netflix, which funded the project and gave it a global platform in late 2023. Shot in striking black-and-white by cinematographer Edward Lachman, the film imagines the former Chilean dictator, who died in 2006, as a centuries-old vampire still living in secret in Patagonia. It arrives at a moment of renewed reckoning with Pinochet's legacy in Chile, where the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup (which brought him to power) fell just weeks before the film's release. Alfredo Castro, a longtime Larraín collaborator, appears in a supporting role alongside lead Jaime Vadell.

A-Z World Movie Tour Chile This was a really enjoyable film actually. Everyone's surely bored to tears with the same old vampire tropes. I'm actually really happy this film took a nice new spin on a classic, well-trodden foe. Blending real world people with fiction worked really well. At first I couldn't quite follow the story (a 200+ year old vampire is sick of life and wants to die, with his family arguing about inheritance) but there's a couple of really good twists which really work well. Cinematography was beautiful. The movie was actually nominated for an academy award for that. The soundtrack accompanied it well and the acting (especially from the Nun) was particularly strong.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-06-06

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Where to watch (UK)

Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK

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