Review by guisreis

It is a strange film which is hard to fit any label or classification. It has great merits, but still disappointed my expectations. It also travels through multiple genres not fitting well any of them, for better or worse: gore horror, dark humour comedy, political satire, and even political thriller. Visually, the movie is very nice and Pinochet's portrayal is astonishing (how similar with the military devil makeup turned Jaime Vadell!). I loved all the vampire origin stories in Ancien Régime. It was also quite good to have a timeline drawn through Haiti, Cuba, Russia (Pinoche always against the revolutionaires)... it would be great if it were more explored indeed. The bad character of all members of the family and of the torturer butler was well depicted. However, the film also has serious drawbacks. The script is unbalanced and should have been tighter. Pace is irregular, alternating awesome moments with quite sluggish parts. The behaviour of the characters seemed too inconsistent too, being hard to understand their motivations, and not because they were deceiving them. The interviews by the exorcist nun were slightlty unconvincing as sonething to actually happen, but they did allow the script to mock and denounce a lot the multiple crimes (from corruption to murder) of Pinochet's family and their impunity.