REVIEW: Renfield (2023)

Movie Reviews

The best thing you can say about Renfield is, “At least it’s short.” The catch-22 is that it could have used more time to flesh out its characters, develop its plot, and attempt to make you care about anything that’s happening. But when you sit through ninety minutes of an ineptly directed “comedy” that struggles to make a joke land, you figure it’s better to cut your losses and hope for something better next time.

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Count Dracula’s familiar, moves his evil master to New Orleans to allow him to recuperate after the latest failed attempt on his unlife. While in town, he joins a support group for people caught in toxic relationships, inadvertently saves a cop (Awkwafina) from a mob hit, and questions whether he wants to spend the rest of his life leading innocent victims to their deaths. But Dracula (Nicolas Cage) isn’t pleased with Renfield’s sudden crisis of conscience.

The reason most people will want to see Renfield is to see Nicolas Cage play Dracula. That’s the real hook, and it’s also the best part of the movie, aside from my crack about the run time. Cage goes for it in what he’s said is one of his dream roles, and he’s the only actor in the film who not only strikes the right tone but maintains it. He plays Dracula straight, and the humor comes from his earnest portrayal of an unrepentantly evil vampire contrasted with the increasingly guilt-ridden Renfield. If this were a serious Dracula movie, Cage’s performance would still work, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. He also benefits from some good makeup depicting his various states of decline and reinvigoration. I’m not arguing that he matches Bela Lugosi or anything, but he deserves a much better movie than this.

Yes, Renfield lets him down at every turn. The humor is rarely successful, with only a handful of jokes working. It feels like director Chris McKay and screenwriters Ryan Ridley and Rob Kirkman are relying on the set-up – what if Renfield sought out a modern-day self-help group to cope with being Dracula’s familiar – to be amusing enough to carry the film. It isn’t, and the many jabs at vampire lore, Dracula and Renfield as fish out of water, the ridiculousness of the supernatural in what everyone else thinks is the real world, and anything else Renfield tries to wring a laugh out of fall flat. The self-help group is mostly annoying, dragging out jokes instead of letting them be quick and punchy, and the byplay between actual characters (of which there are, generously, four) is dull and trying way too hard to be clever.

Perhaps Renfield could have worked as a more serious take on the Dracula story, but the script still would have needed a lot of work because these elements are half-baked, too. The plot feels like points on a map rather than an unfolding story, with people going where they need to go to set up the next scene. The various characters are thrown together haphazardly, and nobody feels like they care what happens next. The film sets up two themes – atonement and learning to be a hero – and either can’t figure out which it would rather keep or believes they’re the same thing, so we’re not sure what Renfield really wants as the resolution to his arc. Ryan Ridley and Rob Kirkman have some good stuff under their belts: Ridley has written some great Rick and Morty episodes, and Rob Kirkman is the man behind the Amazon series Incredible, which is fantastic. I don’t know what happened here. (Although, between this and the Marvel productions featuring Rick and Morty alumni, I’m starting to think the success of that show rests solely with Dan Harmon and the recently dismissed Justin Roiland; good luck, Adult Swim.)

Are the actors let down by the script, or do they make it worse? I tend to think the former because there are some good performers in Renfield. Nicholas Hoult can be funny and menacing, but his Renfield is devoid of humanity, and he really needs some. There are lazy attempts to give him a tragic backstory (beyond being enslaved to Dracula), but it’s treated as an afterthought, something Renfield doesn’t dwell on much, and it only comes up when the movie needs him to relate to Rebecca. Rebecca is Awkwafina’s character, a police officer seeking vengeance for her father’s murder who stumbles onto Renfield and… well, it’s unclear. The film can’t seem to decide if these two are romantically interested in each other, and while it seems clear that they are for a couple of scenes, it’s quickly dropped and never mentioned again. Awkwafina is fine; she plays the same character she always seems to play, and she does it as well as she can with bad dialogue, but her personality and brand of humor don’t really fit what Rebecca is supposed to be.

For a ninety-minute movie, Renfield is a little overstuffed with plot, which may be why it’s so undercooked. For example, Rebecca wants revenge on the organized crime syndicate that murdered her father. She bumps heads with her fellow cops, half of whom are on the take, and her sister, and FBI agent who’s also after the gangsters but wants to be meticulous in her pursuit of justice to make sure the charges stick. (Sidebar: Renfield tries to argue that Rebecca is hot-headed in her zeal to bust the gangsters, but nothing she does is out of line, so it makes little sense.) Why add this complication? Wouldn’t it have been better to have had her father killed by Dracula, perhaps after Renfield led him to his doom? That would create a conflict between her and Renfield and would flesh out the atonement theme of Renfield’s arc (which is the one the movie should have settled on; the “be a hero” thing is getting tired).

But that wouldn’t allow for the action scenes where Renfield – who gets super strength when he eats bugs – rips through scores of bad guys. Renfield isn’t so much a horror-comedy as an action-comedy, with fight scenes taking the place of terror or suspense. There’s a lot of over-the-top gore, and a few of the kills are neat and satisfying, but the action is poorly filmed and staged, with tons of quick cuts and strange angles that obscure what’s going on in the fight. Chris McKay directed The Tomorrow War, which I liked very much, and it’s hard to believe the same guy who made that movie put these action beats together. A few times, I had to guess what happened to some of Renfield’s opponents because the kill was either cut away from or obscured. Seeing this movie so soon after John Wick: Chapter 4 is an eye-opener. The music comes from someone else I usually love, Marco Beltrami, but it’s a goofy pastiche of homages to other films, some of which don’t fit at all, further attempts at humor that crash and burn.

If seeing Nicolas Cage play Dracula is enticing enough for you, I would recommend you wait till Renfield shows up on a streaming service in what I can’t imagine will be long after its premiere. But either way, I would skip going to the theater; nothing in this needs to be seen on a big screen or with a crowd as bored as you’ll likely be.