I'll just let the premise speak for itself:
Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire. Born Claude Pinoche, he was a soldier of the king's army in France during the revolution, and the experience left him with two driving obsessions - becoming a king, and destroying all insurrectionists and revolutionaries.
Setting his sights on a long strip of a (mostly) desert nation in the ass-end of the globe, he decides to build his kingdom there. He rises through military ranks, stages a coup, and the rest is history. Then he fakes his death and goes off to an island somewhere around Santiago with his wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) and his manservant (and former head torturer) Fyodor (Alfredo Castro). There, in a large, run down manor, he loses the will to live: he can cope with his country calling him a murderer, but a thief? The nerve! (later on, when accused of stealing millions, he casually agrees, but demurs by saying his wife put him up to it).
When a rash of horrible killings rock Santiago all of Pinochet's children, sensing their father's hand behind it, go to the island to see what's up - and to check if they can wrest an inheritance out of the old vampire. They contract an accountant to help with that, but as it turns out, she's a plainclothes nun (Paula Luchsinger) sent with the mission to exorcise the old demon. Or to kill him.
And then things get weird.
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| Watch out, lady! There's a Chilean fascist dictator vampire right behind you! |
Director Pablo Larraín is no stranger to making films about Pinochet's regime -both as straight historical pictures and oblique genre exercises- but this... This is something else. Angry, arch, bizarre, twisted and funny as hell, full of surprisingly violent, gruesome deaths, and a truly out there surreal, satirical edge. All swaddled up in gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Edward Lachman) and timeless classical music.
It's fucking great, is what I'm saying. I feel I should qualify that by saying that it's for people who enjoy the bizarre and all that, but I think that should be pretty clear by now. It's also got a languid pace, a very slight plot full of out of nowhere developments, and minor characters that are more targets for (very funny) barbs about hypocrisy and obliviousness than actual, you know, characters. If you use the word artsy at all, it applies to this film.
The script, by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón is full of funny, clever twists and imagery - the funniest of which is probably Pinochet's going out in his full regalia and using his vampire powers to fly out into the night, flowing cloak and all (the narrator describes him as looking like 'a pimp in the hide of a banana republic mafioso', and backs it up with photographic evidence).
There's some truly audacious ideas here as well (the reveal of the very British narrator's identity got a big belly laugh from me). It doesn't short-change the genre elements, either - it's too ridiculous to ever be scary, but it's got an effective sense of menace, it gets pretty gory, and the film's minor vampire lore variations do inform the narrative and allow for some cool stuff, namely a stunning wire-assisted scene where a fledgeling vamp spreads her wings for the first time.
The dialog is sharp, with a real ear for how people justify both the most heinous and the most banal of evils - I guess it gets a little too on the nose, politically; Its targets are too obvious, if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, but that's not a criticism I have a lot of time for in this particular case. This shit really is worth getting angry about.
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