It is always encouraging to find directors who aren’t afraid of taking risks, and few filmmakers in recent years have been taking bolder swings than Pablo Larraín, who has spent roughly the past decade oscillating between his native Chile and other countries, crafting unforgettable works that look at the past, present and future (often in tandem), drawing from history and adding substantial layers of speculation onto the lives of well-known figures, or entire periods in the past. In the case of El Conde, he has made perhaps his most ambitious film yet, a daring and provocative dark comedy that continues his streak of taking historical individuals and presenting revised or alternate versions of their lives – and his target in this instance is Augusto Pinochet, the former President of Chile, a position he held for nearly two decades. However, this is not an account of his years in office – in fact, if there is one period that this film does not explore, it is the couple of decades between the early 1970s and late 1990s, which were the years in which his dictatorship lasted. Instead, the director chooses to go back in time to a few centuries before his official birth, as well as to the present day, nearly two decades since he died, to take this notable historical figure and make a bold proclamation: he is a vampire who has lingered for 250 years, and has finally decided to take his permanent leave and finally succumb to the death he has been craving for years, but has yet to encounter, leading to an active effort to have his immortality reversed so that he may finally be at peace. A wildly entertaining and wickedly funny film that shows exactly why Larraín has managed to carve a niche for himself as one of our most exciting contemporary filmmakers, someone who is willing to take a gamble without even a moment’s hesitation, El Conde is a fascinating and often quite mystifying dark comedy that goes in search of something quite profound and emerges as a wacky, off-the-wall examination of the relationship between the past and the present.

When presented with any film, our logical response is usually to situate it within some kind of recognizable category – after all, we tend to gravitate towards stories that are most like the ones we have enjoyed in the past, which is the very purpose of the genre as a whole, as it is purely a means of classifying art under broad terms to allow for a more streamlined process on both sides of the relationship between the artist and their audience. Unfortunately, Larraín has never been one to adhere to conventions, and even something as simple as choosing a genre for this film becomes a challenge, since there is something quite off-kilter about this film, a quality that we can never quite identify since it is unlike anything we have seen before. It is certainly comedic, filled with a bleak, dark humour that makes it seem like everyone was aware of the absurdity of the project on which they were working – but we are often too bewildered by the madness on screen to ever surrender to the laughter. It has narrative details and visual components that situate it within the horror genre, but yet the most terrifying aspects are those drawn from the moments not normally associated with horror – and this isn’t even accounting for the elements cobbled together from psychological drama, historical epic and crime thriller, which are all found scattered throughout this film. Normally, we would criticize a film that leaps so liberally between genres, but in the case of El Conde, this becomes one of its most sincere strengths – there is something deeply captivating about a film that is willing to take a few risks at the primordial level, and while it may seem like it is undergoing something of a crisis of identity, we soon come to learn that what Larraín is doing with this film is quite intriguing, since refusing to allow it to settle into a particular genre for too long prevents it from ever becoming unnecessarily convoluted. It takes a lot of skill to make something that manages to reconfigure narrative and thematic instability into a creative, daring project that seamlessly weaves its way between genres, but El Conde achieves it with seemingly very little difficulty, which is why it manages to feel so fresh and invigorating, while also drawing on a familiar sense of unease that we come to find embedded deep within the story.

Once a director has established themselves as someone who produces good quality work, actors usually tend to flock in their general direction, especially when they are rambunctious, ambitious filmmakers such as Larraín, who has been attracting quite a considerable corpus of talent to his various works over the years. El Conde gives him the chance to work with two bona fide legends of stage and screen in his native Chile, namely Jaime Vadell and Gloria Münchmeyer, who are both astonishing, playing the roles of the elderly versions of Pinochet and his long-serving wife, who stood by his side over the years, but gradually found her faith in her husband eroding, or at least in how the film conveys their relationship, which may not be the sole focus but is certainly a major factor). It is difficult to play roles like this without it feeling slightly over-the-top, especially since the film as a whole is not always particularly effective in how it examines certain ideas, which often manifests in these performances, which can be slightly ambigious on a moral level. However, these vague elements ultimately work in the film’s favour, as these are hilarious and irreverent performances from actors who entirely understood what was being asked of them throughout this film, and are more than willing to trust in the director’s vision, secure in the knowledge that the final product will be something worth both the time of the artists and the audience, who will undoubtedly be taken by this film and everything that it represented, which is mainly kept to the characters, who prove to be fascinating foils for the director’s bizarre but captivating vision that drives this film and pushes it forward to untrodden narrative territory. Special mention must also be given to Stella Gonet, who not only narrates the film but appears physically, playing the part of Margaret Thatcher, another wildly controversial individual who becomes so gloriously captivating through how the film takes many risks, most of them paying off splendidly well.

Beyond how the main character is constructed, there is quite an interesting question being posed throughout El Conde, which aligns with many of the director’s previous films, which often take the form of unconventional works that are deeply strange reworkings of history, whether from the perspective of individual figures (such as Princess Diana, Pablo Neruda or Jackie Kennedy) or entire periods, as we have seen in films like No and Post Mortem, all of these films being quite memorable. However, what Larraín seems to be asking, or at least implying forms the foundation for such a film, is whether or not it is acceptable to rewrite history for artistic purposes. He is not the first filmmaker to employ this tactic, and by comparison, he is one of the least egregious since he never conveys the sentiment that what he is doing is somehow steeped in reality, rather than being wild flights of fancy that go in many unexpected directions. The truth of the matter is that history is unfortunately subjective – outside of the solid facts, which are usually numerical, nothing can ever truly be immune to debate and discussion, so when setting out to explore the history of Chile both under Pinochet’s rule and in the aftermath, what difference does it make whether it is a straightforward, beat-for-beat recreation of the events or an offbeat dark comedy in which the notorious dictator is reworked into an ancient vampire, someone who has his origins in Pre-Revolution France, and has continued to persist well into the 21st century, which he chooses as the most appropriate time for him to leave this immortal coil in which he has been existing for centuries. El Conde is not revisionist history so much as it is a wildly ambitious attempt to dismantle everything logical and coherent about the past, then rebuilding it as a vaguely nightmarish, deeply unnerving dark comedy without any sense of rational thought, and which is instead dreamed by a bizarre sense of surrealism, which has been something that the director has often used as the foundation for his films, even those that are not blatantly formed along the lines of comedy.

By this point, we are all aware of Larraín’s prowess as a storyteller, and his ambition when it comes to conceiving certain ideas has become one of his greatest assets, even when he is collaborating with another writer in putting these ideas onto the page – and in this instance, his partner was Guillermo Calderón, an acclaimed playwright who is not a stranger to pushing boundaries. However, the aspects of El Conde that are most interesting are unsurprisingly the ones that are not only tied to the narrative but rather how it manifests on screen. Larraín is a great visual stylist, and he chooses exceptional artists with whom he intends to collaborate since the results are usually remarkable. Logically, there shouldn’t be any need to wax poetic about Edward Lachman, who has been at the forefront of the cinematography industry for decades, and who has done more than enough work to be associated with quality and a high calibre of work, which is something that the director was looking to establish when constructing this film, which is as much about the storyline as it is how it is shown on screen. There are countless moments throughout El Conde in which the beauty is almost intimidating, despite how bleak the landscapes in which the film takes place tend to appear. Filmed in glorious black-and-white, which is crisp and bursting with detail, the film is a marvel on a visual level, with the costumes and production design being just as strong. Ultimately, most of this film required a strong sense of cohesion between the different technical departments, and Larraín’s attention to detail allows everything to flow together quite beautifully, leading to a film that is as visually arresting as it is narrative provocative, both of which are interwoven into the fabric of El Conde, which truly does benefit from this level of immense creativity and sincere attention to detail.

In no uncertain terms, El Conde is one of the most ridiculous films of the past year – how are we able to justify a two-hour-long dark comedy that proposes that not only is Pinochet the illegitimate son of Margaret Thatcher, but that they are part of a lineage of vampires that have been lurking in the shadows for centuries, choosing the most vulnerable people on which to prey, which often leads to them running into the most inconvenient outcomes. This is a very daring film – vampire stories are certainly not in short supply, and it seems like everyone has their version of what this means, and how they are generally quite distinct, to the point where jumbling them together, as we saw in this film, can sometimes be quite remarkable in ways that are singularly quite unexpected, especially for those expecting a more conventional film. Satire often only becomes effective when it isn’t so obvious, but it can also be profoundly captivating when it is self-aware and has something valuable to say, which is arguably not always particularly common, especially not in the contemporary landscape, where everything has to be very clear or else it risks being viewed as a failure. El Conde is not afraid to be bold – in fact, it is encouraged to go as far as possible without crossing the threshold of decency. This freedom allows Larraín to take some calculated risks, and the final product is a hilarious and irreverent dark comedy with a strong sense of humour and a level of ambiguity that leaves space for discussion and interpretation. It is not a film that will appeal to every taste – the viewer needs to have some sense of appreciation for the more absurd side of art for us to ever truly understand entirely, which appears to be the entire thesis statement of this bizarre but brilliant dark comedy that aims for the boldest storyline and manages to perfectly encapsulate its main ideas into something so concise and exceptionally detailed since those are the aspects that stand behind a film such as this being so deeply captivating and always wildly entertaining in ways that are so unique and utterly deranged, which seems appropriate for someone who has made a career from challenging the boundaries of his craft.