It’s hard to tell how seriously Renfield takes it’s own conversation on toxic relationships and codependency. Four scenes across the ninety minute movie take place at a support group for people struggling with these very things, and there’s an ironic detachment with which it is played, Brandon Scott Jones’ aphoristic group leader especially characterized as a figure of parody. And the links drawn by the titular character, the age old familiar of Count Dracula, and his relationship with the Lord of Darkness, are especially in the early goings baked with such contextual extravagance that it seems a quaint analogy. It’s not until later in the film that the script seems to endeavour to make some genuine comment on the nature of toxic relationships, but by then it’s difficult to parse any apparent sincerity from the cheap way that idea and it’s pithy grammar has functioned through most of the movie as a mere device to drive apart master and servant.
But the messy ways in which this movie both makes fun of and raises earnestly the notion of Dracula and Renfield as a centuries-old partnership of abuse is just one part of what results in Renfield, directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley, being so confounding and honestly irritating a film. A tepid, generic comedy that attempts to attach itself to the legacy of Tod Browning’s 1931 classic but it is as far apart in aesthetic, tone and craft from that as any movie made in the modern studio system. In fact, though it’s likely not the exact origin, this movie stinks of being built around a gimmick -in this case almost certainly the idea of Nicolas Cage playing Dracula. An actor known for his expressionistic, hammy style playing one of the best known models of that form in Hollywood history; because he is playing specifically the Bela Lugosi model and enjoying it thoroughly. But the actor having fun doesn’t always translate to the audience having fun, as Cage’s late career speaks to emphatically. There’s only so long before his take on Dracula wears thin (it’s after about five minutes of screen-time), and yet nowhere else in the movie will you find half as much dedication.
Maybe that is a bit unfair, because Nicholas Hoult playing Renfield, is not phoning it in by any means. In fact he’s playing a thoroughly decent character competently -just not a character who should be Dracula’s Renfield. Hoult, who famously played Hugh Grant’s son in About a Boy twenty-one years ago, has grown up to choose the Hugh Grant type as his approach here. And he makes for a good charming, bumbling Brit -he might do well in a rom-com- but it’s a bizarre take for his character here, who is missing most of Renfield’s defining features from the story, minus the bug-eating and corralling of victims for Dracula. Because he is required to be the protagonist, he is written to a modern homogeneous pitch -a sympathetic guy who is in no way insane, just dealing with some shit. Also, he has superpowers because it’s important the film tap into that market.
It’s an overall abysmal screenplay, even just going off the jokey dialogue, which can be surprisingly hackneyed and derivative (it’s got an R-rating but uses it for the tamest comedy). Yet the blandness of the plot structure is probably what most hurts the film. It’s set in New Orleans, a seeming nod to Anne Rice, where Renfield has been slowly rejuvenating Count Dracula after his last near-death, and questioning his relationship to his vampire master. As Dracula nears full strength, Renfield gets involved in the cross-hairs of a completely unrelated conflict involving the mob and the police, specifically a traffic stop officer, Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), whose hero father was killed in the line of duty by this same crime syndicate. You see the problem. A stack of highly conventional and utterly mundane crime movie clichés, the kind a comedy like this might have one time mocked, are made the principal context Renfield and Dracula’s conflict is set against. It’s such a weird choice to have a melding of dollar store Scarface and dollar store Serpico as the central plot-line to a story about a vampire’s inane ambition to take over the world and the wishy-washy moral quandary of his servant. And with the main figures on each side of the law played by a bored Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz of all people (if you ever thought Schwartz could work as a villain -he can’t), there really is nothing to that story angle of substance -the writing lending it an even more undeniable character of celebrity cosplay.
On that note, Renfield’s ambitions to look like a superhero movie are in some way understandable, but pretty expectedly artistically cheap. It’s a dull approach made all the more dull by the hectic way in which the primary action scenes are executed, shot and cut in a way that disorients the space or any elements of reality -but always with an eye for the gore. Indeed while it’s superhero archetype might be something in the vein of Spider-Man it’s going for The Boys -style visuals. Which makes it all the weirder that it’s so restrained. Yeah, it wants to show off it’s bloodiness but is doing so in a movie that feels otherwise downright kid-friendly in it’s base character types and humour. And even the splatter elements leave a lot to be desired -there’s very little creativity to the graphic violence and none of it feels tangible.
To the film’s credit, it is one of the rare movies of the last couple of years that has been bold enough to portray it’s cops as inherently awful and corrupt, even if it has no interest in examining that beyond adding another meaningless obstacle for the protagonists to push through. Certainly there’s enough to shield the movie from accusations of social commentary. And yet Renfield still wants to look like it is saying something. It still wants that conversation on codependency and the related trauma to mean something -because such a subject is the mark of a conscientious, good movie these days. But it is ultimately trapped by its’ own irony and unwilling to make the sacrifices of tone and character needed to explore such a theme substantively. It is also just overall a gutless movie -it’s final minutes proving this decisively. In the original Dracula, Renfield is a character nobody thinks about too much -he is arguably more of plot device than anything else. And Renfield the movie deserves even less of a glance.
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