The cruelty at the core of this vivacious vampiric farce is blended up with sharp yet silly gallows humor, ensuring the grim absurdities Larraín gracefully teases out increasingly take flight even as he continually drags us into gruesome and gory depths.

As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.

Justin Chang

Los Angeles Times

Narrated in crispy voiceover like a Grimm tale, the result is something unexpected: fun, bloody and ambitiously centuries-spanning, the film demonstrates with sting over one-too-many freshly-blended heart cocktails that malevolence has always been an everlasting presence amongst us.

Tomris Laffly

TheWrap