“Nothing Inside”: On Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023)

This man who watches you returns from hell […]; he is hollow, he is full of air.

Dry hands hold him upright from behind, like a house of cards being built, every part of it trembling.

His message is this: ‘There is no third dimension, the Earth is flat, man crawls. Hallelujah!’

Maybe it’s the devil who says these things, and maybe you believe them because they’re the words of a king.

– Julio Cortázar, “Instructions for Understanding Three Famous Paintings”1

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At the opening of Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023), a female, English-speaking, upper-class-London-accented voice establishes the story about to unfold as “this whole farce.” Though the initially unnamed narrator proves to be exceedingly unreliable, on this point she is quite truthful. A farce it is, this film, a feature-length joke. The setup is quite funny: Augusto Pinochet, the military strongman who clutched Chile in his iron grip between 1973 and 1989, was actually a vampire who faked his own death in 2006 and still lives in a crumbling compound on a desolate plain by an Andean lake, isolated enough to give him the quiet he seeks yet not so much as to be too far away from Santiago, the big city, to where a hungry bloodsucker may fly during the night and kill a few unwary innocents and rip out their hearts and stick them into the closest available blender to zshuzsh them into smoothies. The punchline, including the reveal of the narrator’s identity, doesn’t stick the landing.

The film’s farcical character surprised me, as it will, I suspect, any viewer familiar with Latin American art’s by-now-century-long struggle to represent the evil of the caudillo, the megalomaniacal dictator. Such a viewer will be, as I was, expecting satire – the kind deployed by some of the region’s great “dictator novels,” such as Jorge Salamea’s El gran Burundún-Burundá ha muerto (The Great Burundún Burundá Has Died), with its faux-grandiose descriptions of the “great man” and his achievements; Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), with its page-long sentences interweaving the thoughts and memories of the crumbling patriarch, his inner circle, and his victims, or; funniest of them all, Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (The Recourse of the Method), with its cunning wordplay and erudite allusions to Descartes and Marx and Freud. Unlike such classics, El Conde fails to needle, to prod, to productively criticize. It does not do, is not interested in doing, the hard labor of satire.

Larraín is nevertheless quite clearly in conversation with the dictator novel tradition. His undead Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is a waxen-faced ruin – showing all over, like García Márquez’ patriarch, the aftereffects of “the havoc of his secret world,”2 the “puffed-up brow and lumpy cheeks” of Salamea’s Burundún-Burundá,3 the “dirty eyes and cold breath” of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Señor Presidente.4 Decrepit, bent over, like Mario Vargas Llosa’s Rafael Trujillo in La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), like Augusto Roa Bastos’s Supreme Dictator in Yo, el Supremo (I, the Supreme), everyone around him kowtows like he’s still the titan of yesteryear, while behind his back pray for him to be gone and machinate how to divvy up his hidden treasure. Unrepentant, like all the literary monsters, still defiant yet drained of strength, still lustful yet impotent.

Commenting on some of these weighty, intricate novels, the Uruguayan poet and critic Mario Benedetti praises Roa Bastos and Carpentier for portraying their semi-fictional dictators as human, multifaceted, ultimately “corrupted by absolute power.” García Márquez’s patriarch, Benedetti argues, depicted as “an apocalyptic beast, a despot of mournful origin, a paternalistic hyperbole” without nuance or complexity, is an inferior achievement.5 Slightly more forgiving of this sin is Vargas Llosa, who in an essay on Asturias’s Señor Presidente notes approvingly that “it is framed as a battle between good and evil in an undeveloped society where evil seems to have won the match. No character is saved.”6 Like García Márquez and Asturias, Larraín eschews complexity and opts for an utterly corrupted world presided over by an absolutely, incontrovertibly evil being. Pinochet is, avers one character, “a beast from hell […] a creature of the devil with no soul, only a black smoke in its chest.” To emphasize the point, Larraín has the patriarch himself confirm that this is so: “I have nothing inside.”

A key difference: the dictators on the page, metaphorical monsters, all long to continue living. Larraín’s Pinochet, a literal monster, longs to die, at least at first. He refrains from drinking blood, eats “only vegetables,” yet still lingers. El Conde’s plot traces his rebirth, his recovering the lust for life. Unlike his literary counterparts, he can magically start anew, grow up yet again to orchestrate another symphony of torture and murder. “He needed a spark: he produced it,” says Salamea of Burundún-Burundá, “He needed an open vein: he opened it. […] Under the thin skulls and in the deepest entrails of men without words or imagination, the ancient beast would reawaken: from his slobbering snout would emerge the braying that turns terror into anger, and once again fang and claw would find the way of blood.”7 No coincidence that when Pinochet is out hunting for hearts, Larraín has Vivaldi’s Four Seasons accompanying him. Not “Autumn,” however (that’s the joke), but “Summer.”

Yet, farce that it is, El Conde is weakest when it leans on plot mechanics. The film opens with an extended flashback that purports to explain Pinochet’s origins and motivations, then goes on to discard or ignore most of the information it has delivered. Born in 18th-century France to, says the narrator, “parents unknown” (even though the narrator knows exactly who his parents were), Claude Pinoche was a soldier “in the army of Louis XVI” until the French Revolution, from which he escaped by “dressing up as a revolutionary” and eventually faking his own death, though not before licking Marie Antoinette’s fresh blood off the guillotine. “He resolved to use his powers,” says the narrator, “to fight against all revolutions. An eternal subject to his beheaded king,” who spent the years fighting for the official forces against revolutionaries “in Haiti, in Russia, in Algeria” (but why would he do this, if he is a creature of the devil who is hollow inside?). A rejuvenated Pinoche, now Pinochet, makes his way to Chile, “land of fatherless peasants,” where he once again enlists in the military, this time with the purpose of becoming “a king,” and eventually rises to absolute power. Larraín knowingly skips over Pinochet’s actual reign, his actual crimes, the actual evil, then plays the very real events of his death and his funeral for laughs. In the present, Pinochet lives alone with his wife, Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer), “even more perverse,” opines the narrator, “and unscrupulous than him,” and Fyodor Kassnoff (Alfredo Castro), the general’s “only and most loyal slave” according to the narrator (who knows Fyodor is anything but loyal). Lucía longs to be bitten by her husband, to become a beast like him, while Fyodor, who has already been so rewarded, longs for her. Pinochet lingers, beset by memories.

As soon as the prologue ends, Larraín sets the plot in motion with shameless misdirection. We see old Pinochet standing outdoors, alone, wrapped in a fur coat. The sky is overcast, the world is gray (except for the coda at the end, the film is shot in gorgeously atmospheric black and white). Cut to the vampire taking flight, dressed in the general’s finery, hat and cape and mirror-shine boots. Then the hunt, the stabbings, the ripping out of still-beating hearts, the zshuzshing. This, the first of two hunting sequences (“Summer” is the other), produces the most indelible images of the film, the ones that have made it to the promotional materials and the trailer. Yet, we learn later on, it is not Pinochet who is hunting at this time (spoiler alert!) but Fyodor, who’s decided to stir the pot, to hasten his master’s demise. The narrator knows this and yet, for no comprehensible reason, keeps it from the audience, an unreliable narrator with no motive for being unreliable, a cheap and clumsy device.

In any case, the vampire killings accomplish their goal: attracting the attention of Pinochet and Lucía’s five human children, who congregate at the patriarch’s home to see what’s what and to, hopefully, finally, get their hands on their parents’ fabled fortune (although the real Augusto and Lucía Pinochet did have five children, all of whom are still living, Larraín elects to give the fictional offspring invented names). One of them, Jacinta (Antonia Zegers), has warned the Church – represented here by a medieval-looking convent of all-white-wearing nuns – of her father’s true nature. Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), the “finest exorcist nun,” according to the narrator, “a lady not for turning,” “meek” and “virginal,” “violent” and “difficult,” “young” and “delicious,” is charged with battling the beast while also, thanks to her “gift for mathematics,” unearthing his secret finances so as to bring some material benefit to the House of God. Carmen is Pinochet’s foil and counterpart. Where he’s incontrovertibly evil, she’s wholly pure and good, willing to give up not only her life but (spoiler alert!) her immortal soul.

The film’s greatest comic achievement is its middle section, which begins with a preposterously farcical Pinochet family dinner that includes Augusto and Lucía talking dirty to each other in front of their five gutless, brainless, sycophantic children, and doing a slow dance to the tune of a military march played by a ghostly brass band that appears out of nowhere. Carmen arrives, under the guise of an accountant “from a military family,” but this fools no one. The Pinochet children are quite content with the nun slaying their father, as long as the hidden funds and offshore bank accounts are all unearthed first. Luchsinger shines here as Carmen, interrogating each of the Pinochets in turn, sensual, steely-eyed, whip-smart, her comic timing (aided by some snappy editing) exquisite. She joins the growing ranks of Larraín’s female heroic victims – like the eponymous protagonists of Jackie (2016), Spencer (2021), and, most especially, Ema (2019) – all beautiful, all strong-willed, all defined by the weakness of their gender and its irresistible allure to powerful men. Carmen is not only the moral but the intellectual superior of every other character, with the possible exceptions of Fyodor and the (still unnamed) narrator. Her verbal sparring session with Vadell’s Pinochet is the script’s highlight, the closest it gets to saying something real about the real dictator.

“I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a thief,” he tells Carmen.

“No,” she responds. “No, no, no. Thieves steal what belongs to others. You use power to enrich yourself, for this is the only way to become rich.”

“I was just a taciturn general,” Pinochet complains, “an intellectual,” until the bribes started, the under-the-table dealings. He just went along.

Carmen is unfettered. “That’s difficult to believe. You are a Captain General. You are a hero. And you’re supposed to be smarter than those simpleton suits.”

The scene is a hoot but holds no real weight. Carmen’s rhetorical fencing isn’t unveiling Pinochet’s evil, which is plain for all to see, nor is it forcing him to face a reality he is willfully ignoring, for he knows exactly who and what he is. “I liked killing. You liked stealing,” Fyodor tells him as the two reminisce about the good old days. Pinochet chuckles, and corrects him: “No, no. I liked killing also.”

Yet the face-to-face is significant because there Carmen reveals her intent to seduce Pinochet, to allow him to bite her and destroy her soul and turn her into a beast, which is what prompts the narrator (how does she know?) to reveal herself and fly to Chile to save the dictator. She is none other than Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet), who, yes, is still alive and enjoying perpetual retirement in some out-of-the-way country house or whatever. Thatcher, Larraín has decided, was Pinochet’s mother, a nubile “English seasonal worker in the vineyards of Southern France” who was raped and bitten by “the vampire Strigoi” sometime in the late 18th century. “I am your love, Count,” she informs Pinochet, “Your oldest love.” Like Fyodor, and Carmen, and Lucía, whom Fyodor finally bites, Margaret was born human and turned into a monster. Only little Pinoche/Pinochet was born a beast, soulless, empty.

Why Larraín thinks this is funny, or insightful, is not clear, though he does take a few beats to explain the (real) Thatcher-Pinochet connection. To wit, the two bonded over their admiration for the free-market policies advocated by Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys,” as well as their shared hatred for Communism and left-wing politics, which led to, among other things, Pinochet providing diplomatic and material support to England during the Falklands War in 1982, which in turn led to, among other things, Thatcher calling for Pinochet’s release after he, already out of power, was arrested in London in 1998 so that he could be extradited to Spain to be prosecuted for his crimes.8 This last is the act by Thatcher that so many Chileans can’t forgive, and for very good reason. Yet is it fair to suggest, as Larraín seems to be doing, that Pinochet and Thatcher were cut from the same cloth? – the Iron Lady who steered Britain rightward through her mastery of parliamentary politics, and the military general who assassinated his own nation’s democratically elected president, took power through a bloody coup, and presided over the torture and murder of thousands of political prisoners? Yes, they were political allies, but were they equally monstrous? What purpose – historical, moral, narrative – does it serve to present them thus?

No matter. Rather than delve into any of it, Larraín opts for the most farcical of endings, for dressing Carmen up as Marie Antoinette, and having her meet the same end as the French Queen, for having the Pinochet offspring huddled together, like the Mystery Incorporated gang, and say things like “I’m not going in that room. There’s five vampires in there!”

Ultimately El Conde lands with somewhat of a thud. While it certainly showcases some of Larraín’s strengths – his technical prowess, his eye for the beautiful image, his versatility and facility with genre – it also shows him overindulging his more problematic inclinations, particularly his infatuation with beautiful women – his young Margaret (Sofía Maluk), a peasant supposedly living on the edge of starvation, wouldn’t seem out of place in a lingerie catalog – being brutalized. Like other recent Netflix-financed projects by Latin American auteurs – consider Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022), if you can get through it – El Conde feels somewhat unshaped and self-indulgent. Still, for better or worse, it will inform future assessments of Larraín’s very real, very committed engagement with two crucial subjects: the still-throbbing scar left on Chile by the Pinochet years – which he depicted so masterfully in No (2012) – and the role of the Catholic Church in the endless battle between good and evil – devastatingly illustrated by The Club (2015). Mostly, I think, for the worse.

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All images are screenshots from the film.