02/07/2021 - Jon Blåhed puts his fingers in too many pies, losing his protagonist along the way

Some claim that when telling a story, one should tease all the goods right away, securing the audience’s interest and never letting it go. Which is exactly what Jon Blåhed seems to be doing in The Count, screened at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, opening up with mouth-watering mentions of psychopaths, murder and white-collar crime, making it all sound positively scandalous even before stating that the film is, in fact, the story of his father’s cousin. The problem is, he runs out of that steam pretty quickly. And while what he explores is undeniably troubling, oddly enough, it’s actually not that engaging.

This might be because even despite that dramatic opener, the titular villain – who passed away in 2007 – wasn’t exactly that flashy. He remains a stranger throughout all the chatter, and although Blåhed shares quite a bit about his various shenanigans, he never gets very close. It’s almost as if he can sense that, and he then starts bringing out different toys: from seating his guests in what basically looks like a white void in The Matrix to bringing back police re-enactments of past crimes. Actress Eva Melander shows up as well at one point, when it already feels a tad overcrowded, and The Count himself just drifts out of sight, just like he had done all his life.

It’s a pity, as it’s all made for a proper film treatment, or at least the kind of “guilty pleasure” entertainment that SNL recently spoofed in its Murder Show sketch (“Two sisters got killed on a cruise in the Bahamas, I’m gonna half-watch it while I fold my pyjamas,” it went, accurately enough). From his father’s suicide to adopting a Russian name, and that fake title, or heinous stories about his girlfriends’ deaths, there is a lot to unpack here, and maybe a murder show, with its longer running time, would actually have worked better. Now, it just feels rushed instead, and not half as “spine-chilling” as initially promised.

Blåhed’s ambitions and his insistence on adding layer upon layer frankly stand in the way – instead of just investigating the man who made his entire family feel, well, rather uneasy, he also wonders why people enjoy listening to awful stories about real events, with clichés like “everyone has a dark side” popping up here and there. He also tries to sit down and process it all himself, while recounting it to strangers, and it might just be this writer’s opinion, but for all their politeness, they also look a tad bored, making one regret the fact that, in the end, it’s not just a story about his father’s cousin.

The Count was produced by Tony Osterholm and Andreas Emanuelsson for Sweden’s Iris Film AB.