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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The Severed Sun review – folk-horror nightmare that harks back to The Crucible

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A widow with an ungodly secret challenges the patriarchal abuse of an oppressive religious community in Dean Puckett’s English chiller

Here is an atmospherically shot English folk horror from first-time director Dean Puckett set in some eerie time of the medieval past or post-apocalyptic future. It’s possibly a bit derivative: there’s a touch of silliness in the Donnie Darko-ish pagan beast-god rustling around in the foliage, and no prizes for guessing who its final victim is going to be. But there are some chills and bad-dream unease as well, effectively delivered by a good cast, well directed.

Among an oppressive religious community in the remote countryside, Magpie (Emma Appleton) is a young widow who is concealing the truth about her husband’s death from the congregation led by her stern father, the Pastor (a potent performance from Toby Stephens). She is increasingly resented as a disruptive influence when she challenges the patriarchy’s abuse, in the form of what she suffered at the hands of her late husband and the violence that she can sense is being perpetrated on a young neighbouring girl by her father, a violence ignored by the girl’s pious mother (Jodhi May). Concealment and hypocrisy are all about: she herself is having an affair with her stepson David (Lewis Gribben), and the Pastor has an unusually close relationship with zealot parishioner John (Barney Harris).

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