What a seemingly weird project for Pablo Larrain, who I equate with very high quality awards season dramas like Diana.

It's also a very inventive idea – the South American dictator Augusto Pinochet is actually a centuries old vampire from France, on the cusp of the end of his life, tired after so many centuries of existence.

His adult children descend on the family compound to squabble over the fortune they believe is going to be hidden in documents that will lead them to offshore accounts and hidden funds looted from his years in power.

Despite his being tired of living he goes on a murder spree across urban Chile, so when his children assume he's responsible they decide to do away with him.

They hire a young nun with training as an accountant to travel to Pinochet and his wife's mansion on a windswept island – her cover story is that she's auditing the finances, but her real mission is to exorcise the demon from and kill Pinochet to both put an end to his killing and get their hands on his fortune.

It goes completely wrong when the aged General instead falls in love with the young woman, giving him a new lease on life and only encouraging him to kill more.

Then it takes the absurd right up to 11 when the owner of the well spoken British voice who's been narrating the whole thing is revealed, her place in the story as bizarre as her presence.

It certainly all adds up to something you've never seen before, but the execution is less successful than the premise, meandering a lot and not always making sense while it gets wherever it's going.

Pinochet's longtime right hand man, his wife, trips to the city to butcher and dismember hapless victims and more breeze in and out of the proceedings, but I never felt like I got a handle on what everyone wanted and who they were.

Visually it's a gorgeously lush film, and I can imagine how you might forget years later than it was all monochrome. The cinematography and framing mean you could take plenty of frames and make very artistic black and white photos of them.

The landscapes and scenery are very well situated, and the scenes of El Conde in flight as he goes off on his nocturnal hunting trips have a haunting beauty to them as his cape flutters in the wind, looking for all the world like a giant bat.

I'm sure some elements make it a parable about dictatorial powers or maybe Pinochet himself (maybe how dictators suck the blood out of a country? The way The West has a nasty habit of underwriting political totalitarianism?), but if it only told its story as well as it looks on screen, it'd be a lot more memorable.