Mischievously but lovingly sending up vampire lore, as well as Huppert's lofty image, it's a slight but highly marketable treat.

It’s more or less a one-joke enterprise -- but when said joke is casting a maximally domineering Isabelle Huppert as a hungry, horny, haute couture-inclined incarnation of Báthory, there’s a devoted audience for whom it will go very far indeed.

A succession of bizarre episodes, often engagingly bizarre, sometimes heavy-handed, although it is notable that the script is partly credited to Austria’s Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek who is not known for humour of any sort.

A little sapphic, a lot silly, and an absolute smorgasbord for the senses, it’s a retelling of the Báthory story that cares little about either reveling in the grisly pseudo-historic details or disputing them, opting instead to have a gay old time.