The Blood Countess Review: Isabelle Huppert is Fabulous as a Lesbian Vampire in Decadent Horror Comedy
The Piano Teacher star plays Countess Erzsébet Báthory in the long-awaited film from queer cult filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger
By Alex Secilmis 20 February 2026
Courtesy of Berlinale
A vegetarian nosferatu, two bumbling old vampirologists, and a goth maid with a bob walk into a giant Ferris wheel carriage. That isn’t the beginning of a grim joke, but rather one of the many vignettes that define the droll, macabre humour of The Blood Countess (Die Blutgräfin). The dark comedy sees lesbian arthouse writer-director Ulrike Ottinger finally make her film about famed serial killer and rumoured vampire Elizabeth Báthory, emerging from nearly two decades of development hell and landing in the streets of modern-day Vienna.
In a role as tailor-made for her as the lavish costumes (complete with a coffin-shaped handbag and Balenciaga-esque sunglasses), Isabelle Huppert is unmitigatedly superb as a bloodsucker with an appetite for young women. Her effortlessly stylish take on Erzsébet Báthory—going by her Hungarian name—is a balance of excess and elegance that encapsulates the film’s charm as a whole. The Veteran French star plays the Countess as she reawakens from a slumber in a Moscow mausoleum to wreak havoc on Austria’s capital. When not indulging in an attractive librarian or a Turkish belly dancer, the Countess is searching for a fabled book with the power to turn vampires into humans. This would spell disaster for her and her loyal underling, Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr), but it is a different story altogether for her nephew, Baron Rudi Bubi (Thomas Schubert), a vegetarian vampire repulsed by blood yet positively enamoured with baked goods.
Courtesy of Berlinale
Ottinger and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s (The Piano Teacher) zany script unfolds as a leisurely scavenger hunt that luxuriates in the film’s lush, ornately composed frames and equally extravagant performances. Blending historic sites with the modern, like the famous Prater amusement park, the setting is a dreamy, timeless vision of contemporary Vienna that allows for some fish-out-of-water comedy but never suggests for a moment that Huppert’s vampire doesn’t wholly command every space she walks into. Meanwhile, one of the film’s greatest attractions is the oddball supporting cast, who tend to repeatedly declare their full name because the joke lies in their very identities. There is the tweed-clad, mutton-chop-sporting Theobastus Bombastus (André Jung) and his fellow academic Nepomuk Afterbite (Marco Lorenzini), who are in town for a vampirology conference; Rudi Bubi’s unconventional therapist, Theobald Tandem (Lars Eidinger), whose idea of a good session is usually a tea and pastry date or drinks and a show; and a Clouseau-like inspector, Unglaube (Karl Markovics), who suspects Báthory is responsible for batches of unsolved murders occurring every 25 years.
Courtesy of Berlinale
The Blood Countess is the kind of movie that turns Conchita Wurst into a vampire and has her deliver a show-stopping performance of Eurovision-winning power ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix” in a climactic scene. To call the film “camp” is an understatement. Still, despite the occasional, knowingly over-the-top hijinks, there is a restraint and a dry humour to the proceedings that make this vampire comedy a markedly German film. I suspected that Stateside viewers might not know what to make of it, and sure enough, multiple American outlets have complained about the pacing, while I have yet to find a European one with the same gripe. With the inevitable comparisons to English-language media already pouring in, the fact of the matter is this isn’t What We Do in the Shadows or The Grand Budapest Hotel—its rhythm is more patient, and its humour less riotous.
Led by an unmissable Isabelle Huppert, The Blood Countess is a delightful, singular take on the vampire myth and a horror comedy of the highest order.