Richard Crouse

Based on Chile’s former authoritarian leader Augusto Pinochet, “El Conde,” now streaming on Netflix, is a satire that reimagines the president and dictator (and other politicians) as a soulless vampire. Metaphorically, the idea of politicians as bloodsucking leeches is not new, but this movie isn’t allegorical. It’s an ambitious vampire movie first and an alternate history political satire second.

Jaime Vadell plays the Count, a 250-year-old vampire, living in a self-imposed exile in a crumbling mansion/bunker in remote Chile, with his wife, Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer), and loyal and an attentive butler (Alfredo Castro). Since getting his first taste of blood licking Marie Antoinette’s plasma off the blade of a guillotine during the French Revolution, he’s been a power-hungry tyrant, most recently taking control of Chile until his “death” in 1990.

Hidden from view for decades, surviving on human heart smoothies he whips up in a blender, he is now in the throes of an existential crisis, troubled by what he perceives as the injustices of his legacy and the ennui of eternal life. “Some people live longer than they should,” he says.

Dispirited, he’s given up drinking blood, and is wasting away, but just as his immortality appears to be finding an end point, some unwelcome visitors—his five inheritance hungry children and a young nun (Paula Luchsinger) with exorcism on her mind—give the undead monster a reason to live.

Shooting in luscious, gothic black and white, Chilean director Pablo Larraín and cinematographer Ed Lachman recall F. W. Murnau and the Expressionist films of the 1920s and 30s. But just as the movie subverts what a political satire can be, the look of the movie also throws expectations off-kilter. The stately black and white suggests classic horror but the film’s grimly funny and witty script is closer on the laugh-a-minute meter to “Young Frankenstein” than “Dracula.” It’s not exactly a giggle fest, it is, after all, about the existence and persistence of evil, but it does trade in dark comedy in a way that Tod Browning never could have imagined.

The vampire allegory—that Pinochet is a parasite who sucked the life blood of his people—isn’t the most subtle, but it does have bite, sinking its teeth into the legacy of a monster.

Although “El Conde” veers off track near the mid-section, the sheer audacity of the idea and a third act reveal gets it back on track. It’s the most original vampire film to come along in years and one of the best sociopolitical satires this side of Armando Iannucci.