When I think about a quintessential Isabelle Huppert film, I like to defer to a largely forgotten feature that will soon turn ten: Serge Bozon’s 2017 Mrs. Hyde. I say “quintessential” because Huppert has long excelled at playing beleaguered women who wake up to their more devilish personas, and that reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic allowed both sides to shine. Her Madame Géquil (pronounced “Jekyll”) was a comically incompetent French schoolteacher who, struck by lightning, went from ineffective to malicious overnight. Huppert has always felt at home playing monsters—I mean this as the highest of compliments—and the effortlessness with which she slips into Erzsébet Báthory, the vampire at the heart of Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess, makes you wonder why no one’s ever thought of casting her as a bloodsucker before. Clad in deep-crimson dresses made even more vivid by her alabaster skin, Huppert is the film’s crown jewel. She’s also its black hole, an indelible demon dwarfing everything and everyone else in her wake; hard as they try, no actor in this lopsided farce can match her hypnotic presence.
And how could they? From the first moment Erzsébet swans into it—perched at the bow of a barge gliding along an underground canal somewhere in Vienna, her incandescently red gown the same shade of the cloth wrapping the entire ship like a massive gift—The Blood Countess bends toward her like a magnet toward iron. Buried in Moscow, Erzsébet has risen from the dead to destroy an ancient book that could annihilate her kind: legend claims that if a vampire sheds real tears on its pages they’ll become mortal again. The tome is hidden in Vienna, which Ottinger and her cinematographer, Martin Gschlacht, immortalize as a maze of spectrally empty alleys. There’s an early scene that finds Erzsébet emerging from the underworld on an escalator in the city’s subway, but that’s among the very few present-day markers in a film that otherwise unfolds in some undetermined past.
Ottinger and co-writer Elfriede Jelinek—the Nobel laureate who wrote the book that spawned another extraordinary Huppert performance, The Piano Teacher—relish in some delirious world-building, stuffing The Blood Countess with the kind of puns and fabulously named characters you’d expect to litter a Pynchon novel. Fellow guests at the hotel where the noblewoman is to spend her Viennese sojourn—located at 7 Blood Lane, no less—are “vampirologists” Theobastus Bombastus (André Jung) and Nepomuk Afterbite (Marco Lorenzini); once the aristocrat starts feasting on the city’s innocent, Chief Inspector Doubter (Karl Markovics) is sent on her trail; and among Erzsébet’s countless relatives is her nephew Rudi Bubi von Strudl (Thomas Schubert, best-known as the sulking novelist in Christian Petzold’s Afire).
As you might expect from a film enlisting former Austrian Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst as an emcee officiating a vampire gala, The Blood Countess is unapologetically camp, and for a while the journey can afford the luxury of coasting on those vibes alone (plus the inebriating alchemy between Christina Schaffer’s production design and the exquisite costumes fashioned by Katharina Forcher and Jorge Jara). Come for Huppert sinking her fangs into people’s necks like the world’s most chic Nosferatu, stay for the flamboyant backdrops and garments. A film that’s enamored with the Italian Mannerist painter Arcimboldo—famed for making portrait heads out of things like fruit, books, and fish, and here cropping up via reproductions covering Erzsébet’s bedroom walls—The Blood Countess can sometimes feel like an odd collage itself, mixing early 20th-century decor with other unclassifiable styles, nowhere more exuberantly than in one of Rudi Bubi’s hangs, the Pavillion Cafe, a polka dot fantasia covered floor-to-ceiling in blood drops.
But all those luxuriant surfaces cannot compensate for sputtering pace. The Blood Countess seems much longer than its two-hour runtime, which isn’t something I ever expected to say about a feature that sends Huppert biting her way through Vienna. That’s because Ottinger keeps intersecting her quest with other subplots, and whenever the focus shifts from Erzsébet, the film seems to wilt and its madcap energy deflate. This isn’t only a function of the script, though it certainly doesn’t help that Ottinger and Jelinek should make Rudi Bubi such a prominent character—eventually electing him as Erzsébet’s unwilling sidekick—only to saddle him with the tritest of arcs. This young man is the family black sheep: a reluctant vampire who doesn’t share his people’s diet and spends most of his screen time hanging out with a psychoanalyst who writes off his patient’s confessions as some strange delusions. It’s also a product of the striking asymmetry in these performances, of the imbalance between how Huppert and the rest of the cast approach Ottinger’s camp. Which brings us back to Mrs. Hyde.
If I keep insisting on Bozon’s film, it’s because it seems to me a formidable Rosetta Stone with which to decipher Huppert’s performance in Ottinger’s. Both works can be broadly pegged as black comedies, and both find the actress treading a fine line between the menacing and ridiculous. So does everyone else in The Blood Countess, but it’s as if Huppert existed in a film of her own; where others around her must strain to meet Ottinger’s pitch, she operates on a much lower key, more deadpan than over-the-top. Nothing she does here feels forced or theatrical—all the more impressive for a feature that asks her to strut around Vienna’s cobbled streets wearing a cape and supersized shades that make her resemble a praying mantis. Her turn is a masterclass in economy: for all the sinister screams and lethal canines, nothing about Erzsébet is more effective or terrifying than the little shrugs and smirks she dispenses to friends and foes. The vampire will go down as one of Huppert’s most memorable creations—which is saying a lot—but she alone cannot resurrect a tale that gradually dissipates all its intrigue.
The Blood Countess premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.