Conde, El (2023) review

Historical revisionism in Chile: in this scenario, Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is born in France, bites a prostitute and becomes a vampire, witnesses the French Revolution (and preserves Marie Antoinette's head), fakes his own death, winds up in South America where he takes over the country and then, as a much older man, gets visited by not only his family (to collect the inheritance he might have hidden) but also Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), a nun who performs exorcisms, and finally his mother (Stella Gonet), who's the narrator.  The black and white cinematography (by Edward Lachman) is sharp and brings to mind horror classics (plus, it keeps it from being too gory) and I understand Larraín's trying to tell the troubled history of his nation ruled by a military junta in an off-beat fashion, but like so many other horror-comedy hybrids it isn't remotely skilled at either genre.  By taking a deplorable dictator and reducing him to a character out of a comic book (he flies around like Superman), it turns him into this "fantasy figure" and diminishes his actual crimes against humanity (nonstop torture with help from the United States) by removing him from the realm of the "real."  I can't imagine individuals who survived the horrors (or their relatives) will respond to this positively....