El Conde gives Augusto Pinochet the Count Dracula treatment

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The best art always depicts things we think we understand but in ways that make us think again. The moody 2023 film El Conde from Chilean director Pablo Larraín — streaming since early September on Netflix — does just that with the satirical conceit at the center of its dark heart: Imagine the late-dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire, rotting away in forgotten anonymity on the grotty grounds of a decrepit ranch on the wind-blasted plains of Patagonia.

Lest that sound silly, consider what are authoritarians but vampires, who glamor the weak-minded, cultivate toadies and suck the life — literally and figuratively — from the communities on which they prey?

In the real world, Pinochet rose to the rank of commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army before seizing power in a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup in 1973. Installed as president after the betrayal of the left-leaning Salvador Allende, Pinochet ruled as a dictator for 17 years, during which time his ultranationalist regime murdered thousands of opponents and tortured tens of thousands more. In his post-presidency years, Pinochet faced hundreds of charges of human rights violations, but died in 2006 at the age of 91 — never having been convicted of any crimes, and suspected of extracting an ill-gotten fortune of more than $28 million along the way. 

Essentially, he got away with it.

El Conde airs on Netflix. Courtesy photo.

Director Larraín expects audiences to come to El Conde already knowing at least some of the actual history of Pinochet’s time as head of the Chilean state, but he diagnoses the roots of the president-general’s malicious influence far before the 20th or even the 19th centuries.

Rendered in lurid black-and-white under a perpetually rain-bruised sky, the Spanish-language El Conde (“The Count”) imagines the one-day dictator beginning life as a foot soldier in revolutionary France with a taste for human blood (which he slakes in one particularly vivid scene on the blade of the guillotine under which Marie Antoinette had been lately beheaded).

This “Pinoche” is discovered as a vampire, but soon escapes after faking his own death — not for the first time — and spending the next 200-ish years enlisting wherever and whenever he can in order to quash revolution and rebellion.

Pinoche becomes Pinochet in South America, reckoning Chile to be easy hunting grounds, and from that point on lives the biography of the true-life strongman (albeit, with regular midnight outings in which he flies through the air, his signature cape flapping over his jack boots, as he alights onto his unsuspecting countrymen to eat their hearts). 

However, in his 91st year, Pinochet only pretends to die again and we find him in his drafty, derelict hideout alongside his grasping, shrewish wife and loyal (or maybe not-so-loyal) butler, whom he has turned into a vampire/familiar/slave as reward for his many years of service leading the death squads.

Pinochet is not satisfied with this low-rent living death and wishes to finally die for real; however, his wife is desperate for him to bite her first and grant her immortality, while his greedy, useless children descend on him to get their hooks in his hidden treasure before it’s too late.

Into this rat’s nest comes a nun, posing as an accountant in order to help straighten out the mess of secret accounts and clandestine real estate holdings, but really sent by her French sisters to end the scourge of El Conde once and for all. Things get even more complicated (and bloody) than that.

The plot could get farcical in the wrong hands, but Larraín layers so much gloom and gore, the atmospheric high tension of a constant string-heavy soundtrack intermingled with the howling of ill winds, and extracts such a sinister performance from Jaime Vadell as the title character, that it remains macabre, unsettling and beguiling throughout — even into a somewhat flabby third act that is saved by the black-humored revelation of Pinochet’s actual lineage.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s often more horrible than horror, which El Conde deftly teases out through its satire — at turns somber and gleefully subversive — in one of the few truly creative retellings of the otherwise threadbare vampire genre as you’re likely to find.