Sitting there in the pedestrian Netflix lineup of movies right now is an astonishing satirical black-and-white farce about an age-old vampire who just happens to be Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell). In this exceptional new film by Pablo Larraín (Spencer, Jackie, No), the conceit is that Pinochet faked his own death in 2006 (the year he perished in real life, at the age of ninety-one). He’s retired to a remote country estate in Chile where, surrounded by his wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) and his crass children who are eagerly looking forward to inheriting his ill-gotten gains, he claims to be prepared to die at last. He’s even stopped eating his favorite food: smoothies made from human hearts ripped out of his victims’ bodies.

But old vampires never die; they just rejuvenate and start their reign of terror all over again. Pinochet is revealed to have been stopping human progress and killing working-class dissidents since he fought on the wrong side of the French Revolution as royalist soldier Claude Pinoche. (Pinochet, in real life, was of French descent on his father’s side and preferred to be called El Conde, “The Count.”) Claude witnesses the death of Marie Antoinette, reverently saving her head for posterity. Then he licks her blood off the guillotine blade. Waste not, want not!

The narrator of the film isn’t divulged till near the end, when she flies to Pinochet’s rescue, but you might recognize the plummy upper-class British tones singing his praises as a great world leader. Her appearance as a bouffant-wearing, purse-clutching vampire is one of the great characterizations in recent film history.