Helga without the H

Every year* I attempt (with varying degrees of success and effort) to watch as many of that year’s Oscar nominees as possible. For the past few years* I’ve posted reviews of these movies here on this blog. At some point before the awards ceremony, I usually write up some sort of over-analysis and maybe some predictions, but we’ll see if I run out of steam before then. In the meantime, today we cover…

*Except 2022, when I was too burned out from 2021’s binge to give a crap.

El Conde

[1 nomination for cinematography]

IS IT SALTBURN? No. But it is significantly more weird.

This wasn’t a high-priority watch. I’m been trying to prioritize films with best picture nominations, followed by films with more than 2 nominations, and/or with nominations in the acting categories. El Conde is nominated for nothing except cinematography. It’s from Chile, and isn’t even nominated for best international feature. However, it was free to stream on Netflix and I already saw all the other free-streaming higher-priority films, so I dug right in.

The main thing to know here is that this movie is straight-up weird. I mean… just sooo weird.

The basic idea is that Chile’s (real) dictator Augusto Pinochet was actually a vampire, who faked his death after leaving office. Now he’s hiding out in a random house in the middle of nowhere, and his kids, wife, servant, a nun disguised as an accountant, and Margaret Thatcher (yes, really) all converge to get his money and/or kill him for real. The details of the plot are, frankly, thoroughly unimportant. If this general concept sounds appealing to you and you don’t mind that it’s all totally ridiculous, you might enjoy this. If you’re like “WTF? Naw” then this is not for you. If you’re where I was going in… you thought “Oh, that’s an interesting concept. With perfect execution it could be awesome!” then you probably won’t be WOWed here. The plot synopsis above really is pretty much all there is to know. So.. stream it for free in the background while doing chores or something, sure. But don’t get too excited.

The film does, however, look awesome. It’s all shot in black and white (so artsy!) which seems to be a ticket for otherwise ho-hum films to earn cinematography nominations. In this case, though, the beautiful bw imagery combined with the wackiness of flying vampires work really well together to highlight the film’s absurdity. There’s a particularly beautiful scene where a vampire (not El Conde, but telling you about the other vampire(s) would be a spoiler) first turns into a vampire and tests out their invisible wings by flying over a beach. It was a delicate, beautiful ballet, jammed into this middle of this ridiculous nonsensical plot.

My main problem with the film wasn’t the weird plot (I can totally get behind weird!) It was that I’m just not familiar enough with Chile and its history to have any idea of what, exactly, is being satirized here. So maybe folks in Chile are all about this. Or maybe folks in Chile hate this. I have no idea. But for me personally, having no idea what the point was supposed to be really hurt my ability to appreciate… whatever it is we were supposed to be appreciating.

Bottom line: I give this film props for picking an insane premise and just going all-out with it. And it looks great. But that’s about it.