Renfield is a fun vampire flick that could have been so much better
Nicolas Cage is Dracula.
That’s pretty much reason enough to go and see Renfield, a horror-comedy twist on the Bram Stoker legend that returns Cage to blood-sucking mode for the first time since 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss (and in that one, he only thought he was a vampire).
Spouting sarcastic comments, sipping blood from a martini glass and even popping up in footage from Tod Browning’s classic 1931 black-and-white Dracula, Cage’s delicious uber-vampire is all we have ever dreamed of, and the only disappointment about his controlled but still slightly bonkers performance is that we just don’t see enough of it.
Instead, director Chris McKay has decided to make a movie that also focuses on Dracula’s servant, Renfield (great idea, especially with Nicholas Hoult in the role) and a New Orleans traffic cop trying to jail a local crime family (not such a great idea because, well, who cares?).
The movie begins on a positive note by introducing us to Robert Montague Renfield, the poor ‘familiar’ who has spent many years tending to Dracula’s needs. In this version, the infamous vampire is extremely difficult to kill but he does suffer extreme decay when attacked or set on fire, so Renfield has relocated them both to an abandoned hospital adorned with hanging blood bags while Drac recuperates from the latest attack on his so-called life (damn those vampire hunters).
While his master sleeps, Renfield attends group meetings for people in codependent, toxic relationships, and captures the partners they complain about so Dracula has bodies to feed on (which is all very What We Do In The Shadows, in a good way).
This indirectly puts Renfield in the path of irritating drug dealer Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz, so good in The Afterparty, so annoying in this) and his crime boss mother Ella (Shohreh Aghdashloo), as well as the only cop in all of New Orleans – Awkwafina’s Rebecca Quincy – who wants to catch them. And since Renfield has come into contact with them, you know it won’t be long before his pointy-toothed boss meets them too.
The movie has some nice little twists to traditional vampire lore – here, Renfield doesn’t eat bugs because he’s batty, he eats them as they give him kick-ass power, while Dracula is a petty narcissist who thinks people should either obey him or be his dinner.
And there are also fun touches throughout, from Renfield’s embracing of positive message posters and colourful sweaters when he’s away from his boss, to the superbly-realised state of Drac’s decay (which heals throughout the film and deserves to win every makeup award going).
The gore is great, too – one bad guy slashes Renfield’s stomach so his intestines start falling out, there's a neat decapitation with a serving tray and even arms being torn off and then used as gruesome weapons – and all the action sequences featuring a jacked-up-on-insects Renfield are fast, bloody and inventive.
It all sounds like a pretty good movie, doesn’t it? And it would be, if more time had been spent on Renfield and Dracula’s relationship, and the reason why Renfield decides, after hundreds of years, to finally break free from his master – and if far less had been spent on the organised crime subplot that seems borrowed from John Landis’s forgettable 1992 vampire movie Innocent Blood (in which crime boss-turned-vampire Robert Loggia chomped on most of the cast as well as the scenery, which is pretty much the only reason to recommend it).
It feels like the Lobo family story has only been thrown in to give Awkwafina's cop something to do, when a far more interesting approach would have been to focus on Dracula's plans for world domination (briefly referred to but never explored) or how the occasionally heroic Renfield is just as homicidal as his fanged employer.
That being said, this does have Nicolas Cage doing what he does best, which is just being generally brilliant, and any movie that features him going full Prince of Darkness has got to be worth a (bloody) look.
Renfield is in cinemas now.
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