Countess Ersabet Bathory is not only the most prolific female serial killer in history but one of the most prolific serial killers period. She’s also a bit of a favourite of mine. As such, watching The Countess was frustrating. I have a lot of thoughts about how this historical figure should be portrayed. To my dismay, my unvoiced opinions were not taken into account in this, a movie made ten years ago.
The Countess follows Ersabet from her childhood through her marriage, and the death of her husband. After this event, she meets the young and sexy Istavan (Daniel Bruhl) whom she takes as a lover. Here we see Bathory’s obsession with youth start to kick in. After interference from Istavan’s father, Bathory belives that he has forsaken her. This of course makes her fall into a depressive madness. During this time, she strikes a maid whose blood hits her face. Believing her skin more youthful following this event, Bathory believes that the blood of virgins will restore her youthfulness. From here, Bathory descends into a whole lotta murder.
First things first. The WLW content in The Countess is pretty low. The vast majority of romance and sex onscreen is between Bathory and Istavan or Bathory and this BDSM guy, Dominic. However, there is a kiss early on between Esabet and her witch friend, Darvulia. Later on, the witch friend asks to share Bathory’s bed for the night and we see her rise from Bathory’s bed in the morning. This is the sum total of the WLW content in the film. It’s shown in two scenes which just meets the bare minimum requirements to be reviewed on this website. If you’re looking for a film with major WLW content, The Countess is not that. There’s just enough content to justify calling Bathory bisexual or otherwise queer. Don’t go into the film expecting a lot of lady kissing. It’s primarily about Bathory’s relationships with men.
What’s absolute bizarre about The Countess is its attempt to give the story a feminist slant. The first act in particular focuses on showing Bathory as strong, intelligent and kind. There’s a lot of discussion about how limited women’s roles are in this society and characters like Bathory and Darvulia opine that men and women are equal. From the first act, I really expected that the film would be a telling of the Bathory story that focuses on the theory that she was framed for all these murders as a way of discrediting her. That’s not what happens.
Instead, Bathory descends into madness and murder for vanity-based reasons. For all their talk about the strength of women in the first act, Bathory’s descent into being a murderess is stereotypical to the point of sexist. Her obsession with youth starts because of her younger, male lover. He is also the reason for her descent into a lengthy depression and possible mental fracturing which triggers her obsession with virgin blood. We’ve also got Dominic, the BDSM guy overtly manipulating her into leaning into sadism. It’s frustrating to have this character be so influenced by men and their attention to her when there’s also so much dialogue which has this weird, “women’s rights” slant to it. While the dialogue attempts to take the film to a feminist place, the screenplay constantly has Bathory and the story itself rely on men for the next plot point to occur.
The Countess is only 90 minutes so it’s a quick sit. Yet its pacing is also pretty poor. The first fifteen minutes are a rushed summary of the first ~30 years of Bathory’s life. This is done via voice-over from Daniel Bruhl who might as well be reading the Wikipedia page for all the insight it gave. This portion of the movie specifically seems to be just trying to show they did a lot of historical research. However, it comes off as not only dry but rather shallow. The Countess offers no more insight into this character than a read of the Wikipedia page.
After this, the movie slows down considerably. The love story between Istavan and Bathory takes up a lot of the first act. It’s pretty dull. There is also such a disconnect between the first half hour of the film taking so much pain to portray her as sympathetic and likeable and the remainder of the movie which is Bathory doing a lot of murder. It makes that first portion of the film feel not just unnecessary but counter-productive. It throws those aspects of Bathory’s character out the window anyways. Because we don’t spend enough time with this character as the movie is only 90 minutes, taking the character from as kind as she is in the first act to the murderous woman she becomes in the third act is too much of a stretch.
I’ve no idea if the fault lies in the writing, the directing or the acting but there’s a disconnect between the words on the script and the actors saying them. It never sounds genuine. The dialogue comes across as stilted and unnatural. It doesn’t help that these characters have no depth. There’s just no connection between the actor, the character they are playing and the words they are saying. I don’t know where exactly this disconnect came from but as writer, director and star, it’s pretty definitely Julie Delpy’s fault.
As a movie, The Countess is all too… clean. In my opinion, everything in this movie should be grittier, grimier and sadder. All the characters, even the poor ones look far too clean. I think this movie would’ve been improved if it focused on how bleak and unpleasant living during this time was. It needed more vermin and maybe some peasants dying of gross diseases on street corners. Personally, I would want a biopic of Ersbat Bathory to be an overt horror film with gore and everything. But even taking that out of the equation, the movie still looks too polished to the point of not being believable for that time period.
The Countess has a base level of competence that stops me from calling it out and out bad. However, personally, I was greatly disappointed by this film. I didn’t find it to be more interesting than reading about Ersabet Bathory on Wikipedia. I think this film would’ve worked better as a character piece as opposed to frantically jumping from one major life event to the next in order to tell the complete story of this character. In trying to do too much plot, The Countess loses track of its characters. And finally, maybe a movie about a notorious female serial killer isn’t he best place for so much feminist rhetoric.
Overall rating: 5.9/10
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