The Countess (2009)

What it's about: Blaming her advancing age for a failed romance with a younger man, 16th-century Hungarian countess Erzebet Báthory begins murdering virgin girls and bathing in their blood, believing that the grim ritual will restore her youthful beauty.

Review: There's a lot of speculation and rumor surrounding the allegedly infamous Countess Erezbet Bathory. Did she have epilepsy or some other disease that drove her to these acts? Was she the victim of a vicious conspiracy so that the king could get out of repaying the debt that he owed her and her husband? No one will probably ever know, and the best we can do is guess at the circumstances surrounding her trial and eventual house arrest. The Countess attempts to take a wild stab at explaining Erzebet and her legend, encircling it around a failed romance. 

Love will make you do crazy things.

The film seems to try and take the various interpretations of Erzerbet's history and meld them into one narrative. This ends up making a fairly contradictory character: as a child she's taught to be cold, cruel, and emotionless, but she grows up to apparently be a perfectly normal and loving mother who lives in a political marriage with her husband. For all intents and purposes, Erzerbet and her family all but rule the country since they have the king tied up in debt through funding of his wars on the Turks. Everything is going their way up until her husband abruptly dies from an inexplicable illness, leaving Erzebet on her own.

She does have some "demonic" influence from a witch named Darulia, but this woman (cast in the role of Erzebet's lesbian lover) does her best to save Erzebet from her own vain desires. When Erzebet is introduced to the son of her cousin, she falls madly in love with him. However, the cousin had proposed marriage earlier, with the intent of inheriting Erzebet's lands and title. So naturally, he sees this as a way to get back at her for turning her down. And this is where the conspiracy starts. At first her lover is sent away to be married elsewhere, and another man is submitted in his place -- one who enjoys a darker sort of pleasure, something that Erzebet finds that she has a taste for. If this is to harken back to the foundation that her childhood was supposed to have set up, I guess it sort of works.

Because between the images of her burying a chick alive in a flower pot to her caring for her children and even sitting at her sick husband's bedside, it's really hard to connect this seemingly kind woman with the horrible crimes that she is said to have committed. She speaks with a very soft voice and is incredibly fond of "lovely" things. So when it comes down to it, the film is really showing her absolute obsession with remaining young -- which wasn't an issue until her lover was removed from the picture and everyone around her kept shoving the idea down her throat that she was getting too old for someone so young (presumably there were at least twenty or so years between Erzebet and her lover). In the end, it does make sense, there are just some aspects that could have been done without. 

Julie Delpy is striking as Erzebet. She not only somewhat looks like the woman with her hair dyed brunette and pulled back tightly from her face, but the range of emotion she shows is incredibly varied. Erzebet often comes off as something of a push over, but this might simply show that she was very well versed in the court games of manipulation and flattery. There are a few scenes where she absolutely explodes, such as when she receives a letter from her lover describing how he is getting married and when she's being walled up under house arrest for her crimes. However, the dull color pallet, while definitely remarking on a time period that was terrible and filled with little more than death, often underlines the lackluster delivery of lines and the poorly written script.

In the end, you really can't feel anything but sympathy for this woman, even though this film candidly shows that she was in full control of her mental faculties as she kidnapped women from all around the realm in order to aid her blood fetish. While a little wobbly in construction, The Countess is an interesting look at one of history's most infamous and least well-known women. It's sad that we'll never know exactly what happened to her, but she'll undoubtedly remain fodder for entertainment like this film for generations to come.