El Conde review – Pablo Larraín’s horror-satire pitches Pinochet as a vampire

Venice film festival: Macabre alt-history faces the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront their past, with graphic-novel energy and directnessThe undead forces of fascism swoop vampirically through our 21st-century global twilight – the fascists once covertly supported by the western powers as a bulwark against communism, and now proclaiming themselves as a vital bulwark against Islamism, wokeism etc.Chilean director Pablo Larraín concerns himself with this international fascism, and some fascism closer to home, in his boisterously macabre, ultraviolent, single-note horror-satire El Conde, or The Count. It’s entertaining in a Spitting Image way, if endowed with a certain willed political naivety, shot almost entirely in sepulchral black-and-white: powerful at the beginning and end, and sagging in the middle.