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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No Other Choice review – sensational state-of-the-nation satire from Park Chan-wook

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Venice film festival
An unemployed paper worker hatches a cunning plan to murder his way back into the job market in this continually surprising black comedy from the director of The Handmaiden and Oldboy

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis, and the state of the nation itself. It is based on Donald E Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997, previously filmed in 2005 by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated. It may not be Park’s masterpiece but it is the best film in the Venice competition so far.

The scene is a perfect family home, where the man of the house, You Man-su (played by Korean star Lee Byung-hun), is benignly presiding over a late-summer barbecue in the garden, grilling some eels that have been given to him by the new American owners of the paper factory where he is employed. Adoringly looking on are his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), her teen son from a previous marriage, their daughter (a cello prodigy), and their two lovely Labradors. But those eels are in fact a heartless and misjudged part of a job payoff; the new US masters are driving through brutal redundancies and Man-su is among them. He is devastated, but without the emotional language to express or understand how profound this loss is to him. He is fanatically desperate to reclaim his manhood in the eyes of his wife, children and pets by getting a new job in the paper industry within the three months before his severance pay runs out.

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