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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Pierce Brosnan: ‘Pink Floyd were my landscape. I was a hippy’

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The former 007 and current star of The Thursday Murder Club revisits his old haunts in London’s Camden Town and Primrose Hill. Can he get past the security guard at the Roundhouse, where he once walked a tipsy Tennessee Williams to his car?

It is a weekday morning and I am standing beside Pierce Brosnan on a deserted backstreet, watching a woman in a hairnet and white wellies hosing down the entrance to a fishmarket. The former James Bond is in full flow. “You know the scene in MobLand where I’ve got my foot on that guy’s throat and Tom Hardy is shooting the shit out of everyone?” He is talking in his rich, buttery burr about the recent series in which he and Helen Mirren play the heads of an Irish crime family. “We shot that right here!” He waves at the woman, who silences her hose temporarily. “Hi, hello,” he calls out. “I shot a television show here called MobLand.” She smiles back at him. “Yes,” she replies sweetly, as though indulging a confused uncle. “No idea, has she?” he chuckles. The hose springs back to life with a hiss.

Brosnan, 72, was raised in Navan, County Meath but is now generally to be found at one of his homes in Hawaii or Malibu, and is in London for the release of The Thursday Murder Club, the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime bestseller. Brosnan teams up with Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as retirement-home sleuths whose weekly divertissement solving historical cold cases turns serious when fresh corpses start popping up. Today, he has agreed to a one-off meeting of the Wednesday Nostalgia Club, strolling around the area of north London where he cut his teeth and earned his stripes. “Down the lane of memory,” he says cheerily.

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