The Blood Countess review – Isabelle Huppert reigns supreme in a surreal vampire fantasia

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Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the ...
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‘Everything became a lie, a performance’ – Werner Herzog on Soviet Russia

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The German director is championing Georgian film-maker Rezo Gigineishvili’s movie about the dying days of the USSR. But, he says, he won’t be drawn into contemporary political debates

What was Stalin like when he was ill? Did he have stomach pains? Did it make him sad? In Rezo Gigineishvili’s film Patient #1, a frail communist leader in the 1980s Soviet Union seeks urgent answers to these questions as he feels his life slipping from him. But the comrade he calls from his hospital bed provides no reassurance: Stalin was never ill, he was only ever strong.

Spurred on to live up to the dictator they called the Man of Steel, the general secretary brushes off his doctors’ concerns and orders to be driven to the Kremlin. But he dozes off before his limousine starts rolling, and the motorcade merely circles the hospital grounds: a melancholy image of a Russian empire locked in ever-repeating cycles of history.

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