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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This is the year the Oscars found God – but can they keep the faith?

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From Conclave to The Brutalist to A Real Pain, films about religion are unusually well represented at the Academy Awards – some with decidedly unorthodox themes
• Warning: contains spoilers

What Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said of New Labour – “We don’t do God” – applies also to the Academy Awards. The secular gong-dispensing rite annually sweeps religion off its proverbial red carpet. The last best picture winner to deal with the subject was 2015’s Spotlight, which hardly proselytised for organised religion – it dramatised the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church. You have to go back to 1973 to find a movie with a priestly protagonist that really beguiled the Academy: William Friedkin’s horror movie The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, winning awards for screenplay and sound.

This year, though, may be different. Two leading contenders, The Brutalist (10 nominations) and Conclave (eight), put faith front and centre. And let’s not forget the perversely charming Holocaust road-trip movie, A Real Pain, shortlisted for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, for Kieran Culkin. If not exactly a meditation on Judaism, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is a beguilingly thoughtful musing on Jewish identity from a self-consciously privileged actor-director whose ancestors survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain serves as a reflection on transgenerational trauma and the meaning of religion after Nazi genocide.

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