Augusto Pinochet, and Chilean life under his 16-year dictatorship, has loomed large in director Pablo Larraín’s filmography. Tony Manero (2008), which was Chile’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, sets a 52-year-old man’s obsession with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever against the harsh backdrop of Santiago in 1978. Post Mortem (2010) rewinds further, to the 1973 military coup that established Pinochet’s rule, through the lens of a man who works in a morgue. No (2012), which stars Gael García Bernal and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, follows the advertising campaign that swayed Chileans to vote against another eight years of Pinochet’s regime. 

In Larraín’s latest film, El Conde, Pinochet takes on a new shape — that of a 250-year-old vampire. Co-written with frequent collaborator Guillermo Calderón (Neruda), produced by Larraín and his brother Juan de Dios Larraín’s production company, Fabula, and starring No’s Jaime Vadell as the eponymous count, the black-and-white film encounters the dictator when he’s finally ready to die. 

As Vadell’s Pinochet takes stock of his past, aggregating the real figure’s unfathomable destruction, El Conde considers Pinochet’s specter in a way that is darkly funny, beautifully shot, and wittily composed. Larraín, who has also directed surreal biopics such as Jackie, Spencer, and Neruda, leans on the unexpected to make sense of such an irreparable legacy: El Conde joins razor-sharp humor with the literary evocations of the vampire to bear witness to a figure who has haunted Larraín’s canon and his home country. For its spirited screenplay, El Conde took home the Golden Osella when it premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival.