Augusto Pinochet

Now, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup d’état against Allende, Larraín’s El Conde again targets Pinochet. However, Larraín has departed from realistic storytelling, creating a grisly, at times even repulsive, presentation of Pinochet as a jaded vampire in his late eighties. He and his enablers retrieve fresh hearts from victims, put them in blenders, and feast on ugly smoothies. Legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman captures all this in rich, deep black-and-white, the only buffer against our aversion to these loathsome individuals

Chilean director Pablo Larraín adds a particularly dark and absurd entry to his films influenced by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. While No is his lightest effort and Post Mortem his bleakest, El Conde is his most absurd. Using the premise that Pinochet is a two hundred-and fifty-year old vampire born in France in 1766 and obsessed with Marie Antoinette, August Pinochet gradually became the dictator of a “country without a king” after fighting in any war that put down the proletariat.