4.0

Renfield Stakes It All on a Bad Joke

Movies Reviews Dracula
Renfield Stakes It All on a Bad Joke

In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, R.M. Renfield is a lunatic patient under the care of Dr. John Seward, whose delusions of lifeforce power gained from the ingestion of insects and small creatures come about from the brief relationship he forms with the Count. Within his cell in the asylum, Dracula supplies Renfield with insects and a false promise of immortality in exchange for getting him within proximity of his next desired victim: Mina Harker. Chris McKay’s Renfield doesn’t draw from the Renfield of Stoker’s novel, but the Renfield of Tod Browning’s 1931 horror classic, itself adapted from Hamilton Deane’s 1924 stage play. In the Bela Lugosi film, it is Renfield, not Jonathan Harker (as in the novel), who acts as the real estate solicitor and Dracula’s first point of contact at his castle, and it’s this visit which drives Renfield to insanity and turns him into Dracula’s devoted servant–the Renfield we all know and love.

Thus, following the events of the 1931 film, Renfield takes Browning’s iteration of this character dynamic and propels it nearly 100 years into the future. Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) and Dracula (Nicolas Cage) have now spent the better part of a century together traveling the globe, acquiring victims for Dracula to feast on. But the devotion Renfield once felt towards his master is starting to fade and progress to exhaustion. He’s beginning to realize that, perhaps, he has been in the throes of a “toxic relationship,” the kind that would only have become clear in the self-care-obsessed world of 2023. How silly! That’s the premise of The Lego Batman Movie and The Tomorrow War director’s third film, a gag premise built on the latent push for therapy speak and self-love which (at this point, very sinisterly) permeates much of modern Western pop culture. But it’s a silly premise in an insecure and tonally incoherent film. It’s not willing to be goofy and gonzo enough for the inanity of its concept, not cool enough for the slick fight scenes it wants to impress you with, and not worthy enough of Cage as Dracula (the real star of this show).

Renfield and Dracula have posted up in New Orleans following another one of Dracula’s feeding frenzies, which Renfield explains in an opening “Yep that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here” voiceover monologue, complete with freeze frame but surprisingly sans record scratch. These frenzies tend to climax with a big fight that renders Dracula alive but physically compromised, needing to flee to a safe place to regain full power and begin feeding again. While Drac recuperates in an abandoned hospital, Renfield attends group meetings for people in abusive and toxic relationships, hoping to use the abusers as fodder for Dracula’s bloodlust. But instead of finding Dracula suitable victims–Dracula protests that one such group of lowlifes do not have “pure enough blood” for him–Renfield acquires the faculties necessary to enact self-care and slowly disengage from his problematic relationship.

Things become complicated for Renfield on his journey towards self-actualization when a group of ruthless criminals led by Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) seeks revenge on the traffic cop who’s been relentlessly pursuing him for the death of her police captain father. In the same bar that they’ve decided to hold officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina) hostage, Renfield decides to consume some of the bugs that, in this universe, really do give him superhuman abilities—abilities to wipe out all the bad guys almost single-handedly. Deemed a hero by Quincy, Renfield is now simultaneously being pursued by the head of the syndicate—Teddy’s mom Ella (Shohreh Aghdashloo)–and a scorned Dracula, crushed that his once-faithful servant would stoop so low as to save the victims he should be serving up as food.

It perplexes one why a film would market itself as “Look, it’s Nic Cage as Dracula!” and make the film itself, well…whatever this is. Renfield isn’t unwatchable–the fight scenes are fluidly shot, edited and choreographed well enough; there’s some fun prosthetics and makeup, a gratuitous amount of (disappointingly CGI) blood and guts, and a deliciously hammy Cage playing a vampire only a couple histrionic rungs below his top-tier Vampire’s Kiss performance. Cage is having the time of his life playing the Prince of Darkness, prancing around in capes and mugging for the camera like his life depends on it, revealing a shark-like maw with rows and rows of razor-sharp incisors. The fake chompers do, unfortunately, obstruct Cage’s speech heavily enough to hold the performance back slightly, but Cage simply overacts around them, ever a maestro at melodrama.

Whenever Cage is on screen, Renfield’s a gas. But he so overwhelmingly steals the show from the character who is bafflingly made to be our protagonist that the scenes without Cage take the air from the room. Nobody cares about Renfield, even if he looks as cute as Hoult, and we certainly don’t care about him in a story like this–something like “Dracula Meets the Mob” that could’ve been a fun B-movie 60 years ago. 

You may be unsurprised to learn that the screenplay is credited to a Rick and Morty writer, with an original idea credit from Walking Dead and Invincible comic writer Robert Kirkman. Renfield’s humor often reeks of the lazy, jokeless “wink-wink” irony humor written by a Gen-Xer who still thinks a running gag about ska music is hilarious. But Renfield is not without its funny bone: A montage in which a newly liberated Renfield gets his own apartment and bounds happily towards it, arms laden with Old Navy shopping bags; an ending sequence based on how hard it is to know the right way to kill Dracula because there are too many; a welcoming doormat giving Drac the go-ahead to enter a building. Moments work. Schwartz’s Teddy Lobo gets an amusing line here and there, though Awkwafina’s raspy, motormouth, no-nonsense schtick to largely exhausting effect (that said, I am happy to report that the most nauseating joke from the trailer, in which Rebecca explains to Renfield that he is like “the guy who gets Dracula’s Postmates,” did not make it into the final film). But the rest of Renfield is so confoundingly sincere in its approach to “self-care Dracula comedy” that there’s no chance it could be perceived as satire.

Sure, Renfield is occasionally the bare minimum amount of fun, and it’s hard to totally write off a film in which Nicolas Cage is having such a good time playing the role he feels born to play. But a hollow, one-note joke premise is holding everything else together by one long, fraying thread, in an R-rated film that uses kid glove gore (and a My Chemical Romance needledrop from their worst album). Renfield is part of the last gasps of Universal’s failed attempt at a “Dark Universe,” which died on arrival with The Mummy back in 2017. Vestiges of the Dark Universe continue popping up, as if it is as reanimated as the characters of its properties, but like Renfield says, there really are too many ways to kill the undead to know which is the right one.

Director: Chris McKay
Writer: Ryan Ridley
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Adrian Martinez, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Release Date: April 21, 2023


Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.

Share Tweet Submit Pin