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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Our Fault review – ultra-glossy Spanish step-sibling melodrama is too bland to be annoying

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Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched

This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024, that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched.

Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their respective parents didn’t marry until Noah and Nick were well into adulthood. At the Ibiza-set wedding of comic relief best friends Jenna (Eva Ruiz) and Lion (Victor Varona), Noah and Nick bump uglies before having the inevitable row that will separate them for most of the narrative until the final-act rapprochement. In the middle part, Noah hooks up with nice (and therefore doomed to romantic failure) Simon (Fran Morcillo), and Nick goes around offices wearing suits and issuing orders in boardrooms. There’s a bad guy, Michael (Javier Morgade), who looks almost identical to Nick but with more perma-stubble, and he tries to wreak havoc on our central lovers.

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