‘The Blood Countess’ Review: Isabelle Huppert’s Glamorous Vampire Mother Rises Above Baroque Bungle [C-] Berlinale

Isabelle Huppert glides through an underground grotto as if she is about to launch a global tour. A neon-red boat slices across the dark waters of a subterranean lake, torches flicker against damp rock, and she sits upright, immaculate, like a resurrected empress who briefly collaborated with Lady Gaga before returning to haunt the Habsburgs. You almost expect her to pull a microphone from her coffin-shaped handbag and launch into a gothic remix of “Bad Romance”. For a fleeting, intoxicating moment, The Blood Countess feels as though it might become exactly that: a baroque pop spectacle with brains, bite and wicked self-awareness with a diva entering the stage and a myth reborn with style. Instead, what follows is a two-hour costume parade that mistakes relentless irony for substance and turns Huppert into the most elegant hostage in Austrian cinema.

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger and co-written with Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, the film arrives with the promise of intellectual mischief. Erzsébet Báthory returns to contemporary Vienna in search of a magical book capable of turning vampires back into humans, a text she must destroy to preserve her undead lineage. Myth meets modernity. History meets camp. High culture meets fang. On paper, it sounds irresistible. On screen, it is exhausting. Though visually, it is undeniable that the film is lavish to the point of delirium. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht bathes interiors in petrol blues and arterial reds. Velvet curtains glow like exposed veins or golden candelabras flicker with ecclesiastical menace. Every frame looks as though it belongs in a museum exhibition and Vienna has not appeared this magnificent since Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. The costumes shimmer in silk, brocade, and carefully curated morbidity. If aesthetics alone could generate narrative propulsion, this would be a masterpiece. 

Unfortunately, aesthetics are doing almost all the heavy lifting. The plot functions largely as an excuse to tour Vienna’s most picturesque landmarks: the National Library, the St. Stephen’s Cathedral or the Prater Ferris wheel. It feels as though the undead secured a cultural tourism grant. Along the way we meet a vegetarian vampire named Baron Rudi Bubi von Strudl zur Buchtelau, two bumbling vampirologists with equally cartoonish names, and a police inspector who appears to have wandered in from a Pink Panther sequel. The film wants to be playful, subversive, and self-aware. Instead, it often feels smug. Wordplay arrives in dense waves, each pun delivered as if it were devastatingly sharp. Yet the more insistently the film highlights its own cleverness, the duller it becomes. Jokes that might land once are repeated until they lose all bite. The humor shifts from anarchic to mechanical, as though the screenplay were diligently ticking off boxes labeled absurd, satirical and intellectual rather than trusting the comedy to arise organically. Stylized bursts of blood and visual nods to genre classics gesture toward menace without ever producing it. The film references dread instead of generating it and what remains is pastiche without peril.

And then there is Isabelle Huppert. She appears to be acting in an entirely different film. While the ensemble oscillates between exaggerated parody and theatrical camp, Huppert remains icily controlled. Her Countess is no caricature but a figure of terrifying poise. She moves with deliberate economy, speaks with precise cadence, and radiates an aristocratic detachment that carries an almost tragic undercurrent. She understands that true camp emerges from seriousness, from committing fully to the absurd rather than winking at it. Scene after scene, she elevates material that scarcely deserves her. She lends gravitas to punchlines and dignity to chaos. One can almost sense her quietly insisting on coherence as the film spirals into carnival excess.

Set against Huppert’s razor-sharp control, the rest of the ensemble often feels unmoored. Lars Eidinger appears surprisingly subdued, as though the film’s visual overstimulation has swallowed the very excess he usually commands with such precision. Thomas Schubert brings gentle charm to his vegetarian vampire, yet the character never evolves beyond its central gag. Karl Markovics adds a note of faded melancholy as the inspector, but his investigation lacks urgency and plays more like an extended aside. The imbalance becomes even more pronounced when Conchita Wurst, Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2014, is suddenly allowed to perform her winning anthem. For several minutes, the film transforms into a lavishly lit music video. The sequence is so brazenly detached from the already fragile narrative momentum that laughter becomes inevitable. It is gloriously camp and spectacularly out of place. For a brief stretch, spectacle and self-parody align with unapologetic boldness.

Yet even this delirious detour cannot repair the larger structure. The problem is not the indulgence in excess but the absence of discipline. Camp demands control, satire requires precision and spectacle needs shape. Here, ornament accumulates without escalation. References pile up, costumes multiply and cleverness thickens until the narrative suffocates beneath its own ambition. Through it all, Huppert remains steadfast. Regal and incisive, she imbues the Countess with a faint current of existential fatigue, hinting at a melancholy about immortality that the surrounding film scarcely earns. She suggests interiority, a flicker of doubt about the glamour of eternal life, lifting scenes that might otherwise collapse under theatrical overindulgence. In a leaner, more focused film, her performance could have anchored something genuinely daring. Instead, she presides over a meticulously arranged masquerade that never quite ignites. By the time the final act unfolds high above Vienna on the Ferris wheel, it becomes clear that the film mistakes accumulation for crescendo. More spectacle does not automatically yield greater meaning.

The ambition is undeniable and the intentions are bold. But dramatically the The Blood Countess remains inert, tonally scattered, and undone by its own indulgence. An actress of Isabelle Huppert’s precision and bite deserved material worthy of her fangs, not a baroque joke that ultimately forgets to draw blood.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where The Blood Countess had its world premiere as a special gala.