El Conde - Black Romance
Thoughts On: El Conde (The Count, 2023)
A vampire that rose to power as a Chilean dictator contemplates death having lost everything but a hidden fortune.
Purely ghastly with flickering moments of stunning beauty, El Conde is the most unique and intriguing vampire film I can think of. It takes the common theme of love and greed associated with the dark archetype of stolen eternal life to conjure an image of a lost child. The sentiment produced by El Conde is familiar; it is one that asserts the corruption of eternity. But the uniqueness of this film is in its religious intervention and its willingness to proffer the idea that a vampire can exist without God (or at least a literal God; a God that is no more than his word). There is therefore no saviour in this narrative, no real divinity to quell the evil lust of the hungry. What oversees the mire of death and bile is not a heavenly father, but a sickening mother, and it is her love that rescues, not the innocent, but the darkness itself. I will remain vague as not to reveal the intricacies of the plot here, but what one senses with El Conde is captured in its final words. Where there may be a word of God, one that speaks as to draw hope, belief and imagination with a promise of love, there is a Mother nature that executes the way of things to a final point as to assert her loving character. The result of this is hauntingly profound thanks to El Conde's play with history; it resoundingly highlights this dialectic between spoken and palpable love, one of the spirit and one of the body, one of men and one of women, one of God and nature, both perfect in the horror of the dark world. Horribly brilliant.
