El Conde (2023, Pablo Larraín) (Patreon)

45/100

Credit due: This isn't just the tiresome prolonged metaphor suggested by its logline (which amounts to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter minus the ostensible irony). Instead, it's a big ol' mess, seemingly incapable of committing to any narrative concept or thematic  idea. I'm particularly bewildered by pretty much everything involving Carmen, the hot young nun who poses as an accountant and spends an enormous amount of time in that guise interrogating Pinochet's adult kids (without Pinochet present)...which should raise some red flags, from their perspective, since they're the ones who hired her to kill Dad in the first place. Why is our secret assassin peppering us with questions about how ill-gotten our family's fortune is? The sequence in which, after being turned, she discovers the rapture of flight is now on my Skandies shortlist, but how it relates to her "character" (defined exclusively by zeal from the outset), or to anything else in the film, I couldn't begin to tell you. And that's true of just about everything, from Fyodor's affair with Lucía to the kids' fear that both parents being undead means that they'll never inherit (a potentially hilarious development that's pre-emptively undermined by Pinochet's suicidal impulse). The one aspect I enjoyed without reservation—dry semi-omniscient narration, in English, from a woman who sounded to me like possibly Helen Mirren (it isn't, but that's the general idea), functioning much like John Hurt's narration of Dogville—winds up being a cutesy twist that produced an audible groan from me when the light finally dawned. I've dug a couple of Larraín's films to date (NO, Neruda), but more often find him overbearing (Tony Manero, Jackie, Spencer); this is the first time that my primary reaction is just: Huh?