‘The Blood Countess’ Review: A Hilarious Isabelle Huppert Fully Puts the Vamp Into Vampire

Key Highlights

• Little of it, however, is the dark congealed claret of blood as we know it.
• Ulrike Ottinger prefers to paint in the garishly declarative, candied reds of off-brand ketchup, kickass lipstick and iridescent B-movie gore effects — the good, lurid, fake stuff, all the more appropriately artificial for a delirious vampire movie that piles lore upon mythology upon pizza-dream vision, hurtling its story several planets past the true one of its ostensible protagonist, Countess Elizabeth Báthory.
• Related Stories Sean Baker on His 'Instantaneous Connection' With Michelle Yeoh on Set of Short 'Sandiwara' and His Next Film: 'My Love Letter to Italian Sex Comedies of the '60s and '70s' Why the Sidelining of Politics in Berlin Is Causing a Stir: ‘If an Artist Is Afraid to Speak Up' About 'Fascism, They Shouldn’t Be Coming’ Báthory’s legacy can afford such liberties.
• The life of the Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer has by now been parlayed into so many folk tales, vampire myths and films — straight and not-so-straight, though few so brashly and glitteringly queer as this one — that Ottinger’s gleefully irreverent film, for all its daft, singular comedy, still feels like it’s honoring a storytelling tradition of sorts.
• Popular on Variety A droll, unhurried imagining of what might transpire if the 16th-century countess were to wake up in a 21st-century Vienna sullied with smartphones, vegetarianism and Eurovision, it’s more or less a one-joke enterprise — but when said joke is casting a maximally domineering Isabelle Huppert as a hungry, horny, haute couture-inclined incarnation of Báthory, there’s a devoted audience for whom it will go very far indeed.