Film Review: "El Conde" ("The Count") (2023).

"Things are about to get bloody..." This is El Conde. This Chilean dark comedy horror film directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón. The film is a satire that portrays a universe in which Augusto Pinochet, a 250-year-old vampire who, tired of being remembered as a thief, decides to die.

By late June 2022, Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Catalina Guerra, Marcial Tagle, Amparo Noguera, Diego Muñoz, Antonia Zegers, and Stella Gonet were cast in a new Chilean dark comedy horror film penned by Larraín and Calderón and to be directed by Larraín. At the same time, principal photography commenced and took place throughout Santiago, Chile.

The film stars Vadell, Münchmeyer, Castro, Luchsinger, Guerra, Tagle, Noguera, Muñoz, Zegers, and Gonet. An audacious reimagining of history. Strong comic performances are highlighted in a film that is both frightening and funny at the same time. Larraín handpicked these actors one at a time, and you can tell. Every actor fits the role like a tailored suit set to one ideal set of mannerisms. That's high-class skill. It is a very funny comedy with an inspired cast that makes sure the political component will not dilute but neither monopolize the plot too much. The film serves up the cringe comedy of tyranny, where much of the humor lies in the way that the characters twist themselves into hopeless knots as they navigate a Chilean wonderland.

This is what great satires do: make us laugh while giving us glimpses of our own reality. The film is a truly funny and absurdly smart film. The brilliance of Larraín's limber tonal shifts is that he can switch between them in an instant, keeping a sharp audience on edge, while never losing our investment in the film. It may be cringe-worthy at times, what with its propensity for showing the Chilean world of violence, torture, and bloodletting, but for those who like their parables to be challenging and salty, do not miss this exceptional film. The film is a clever, intelligent bit of political comedy, history played for laughs, that is a refreshingly change from the usual low humour comedies of recent years. The brutal legacy of Pinochet's regime is hardly the stuff of comedy [but] the script successfully negotiates a balance between dark comedy and absurdist horror. This is black humour at its blackest and best. It shoots a taproot down to our deepest humanity, and it does so, ironically enough, by revealing the hellish sources of our own inhumanity. Paralysed by fear, the right answer now the wrong answer; the Chilean Politburo sounds a lot like Twitter. Moving from panic to farce and biting one-liners, it's crammed with sharp performances. The film is one of the funniest, most absurdly dark and frighteningly relevant political satires I've ever had the pleasure of viewing. When the film ends, Larraín seems to have invited us to rethink our relationship with the past and with present politicking. It's to his great credit that he does it all while making sides ache from laughing.

Simon says El Conde (The Count) receives:

Also, see my review for Lisey's Story.