El Conde (2023)
★★★ — El Conde (2023)
Vampires. I'll be honest, it takes something pretty special to make me sit up and pay attention when that word comes up these days. We've had the brooding romantics, the horror show monsters, the sparkly teenagers. The well is deep and, for most of us, thoroughly drained. So when El Conde came up as my Chilean stop on the A-Z World Movie Tour, I wasn't sure what to expect. What I got was one of the freshest, most genuinely inventive takes on the genre I've seen in years.
The premise is wickedly simple and wickedly clever: Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, didn't actually die. He's a 200-year-old vampire, tired of the whole business, who has retreated to a crumbling estate at the bottom of the world and decided he's finally had enough of living. His family have gathered around him, bickering over the inheritance, each one as grotesque and self-serving as you'd hope. It's black comedy, political satire, gothic horror and family drama all rolled into one, and somehow it holds together beautifully.
I'll admit, when I first settled in, I found myself slightly lost in the early going. The story takes a little while to find its footing, or rather, it takes a little while for you to calibrate to its particular frequency. Once you do, though, it clicks. And when the twists arrive, they genuinely land. I won't say more than that, but there are a couple of moments where the film completely wrong-foots you, and they're the kind of surprises that feel earned rather than cheap.
What I keep coming back to, though, is how the film looks. Shot in a stunning black and white, it's the kind of cinematography that makes you stop mid-scene just to take in a frame. The Academy Award nomination it received for that was absolutely deserved. There's a bleakness and a beauty to every shot, a quality that feels timeless in a way that suits the material perfectly. You've got a centuries-old monster rattling around a decaying mansion at the end of the earth, and the visuals make you feel every one of those years.
The soundtrack matches it well too, which isn't always a given. Horror and dark comedy can be tricky to score without tipping the balance too far one way or the other, but here it complements the mood without ever overwhelming it.
And the acting. I want to give particular credit to the performance from the nun, who is an absolute standout. There's a strange, unsettling energy she brings to her role that kept me genuinely guessing, and that's exactly what a film like this needs. The rest of the cast are solid throughout, but she's the one I kept watching.
Blending real historical figures with genre fiction is a tightrope walk. Done badly, it's tasteless or just baffling. Done well, it becomes a genuine piece of political commentary with teeth (forgive me). El Conde does it well. There's real anger underneath the absurdity, a reckoning with legacy, with how monsters evade accountability, with how families enable them. It's not subtle about any of that, but it doesn't need to be. Subtlety isn't really the point when you're depicting a dictator drinking blended human hearts in a blender. I loved The Wolf House for similar reasons, actually. Chilean cinema has a remarkable willingness to confront its own history through surreal, formally bold filmmaking, and El Conde sits proudly in that tradition.
Four stars from me. It's not a perfect film and the opening act requires a bit of patience, but once it gets going, it's sharp, beautiful, funny and genuinely unsettling in equal measure. If you're as tired of standard vampire fare as I am, this is exactly the kind of thing to restore your faith.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-06-06
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
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