Renfield
Directed by Chris McKay
Screenplay by Ryan Ridley, Robert Kirkman
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Nicolas Cage, Ben Schwartz
Runtime: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Available in Theaters April 14th

by Joe Carlough, Staff Writer

All movies require some suspension of disbelief: to enjoy them, you have to live in a world in which superheroes exist, or the monster really is under your bed. Sometimes that suspension needs to be more meta, though, more a suspension of reality. A willingness to follow the movie where the director takes it, with their instilled intention: documentaries show you who people are, but those people are still shown through the lens of a documentarian, their editor, and however-many-other levels of film production. Sometimes, the belief you have to suspend in order to truly enjoy a movie is that the director wanted to make a good movie. Not all movies are made to be movies of substance. As an ardent supporter of B-grade schlock and gore, I really enjoyed watching Renfield, even if the constant action sequences sometimes sucked the life out of the movie. 

I spent the first thirty minutes of Renfield trying to make sense of what I was seeing: I came into the theater cold, having no knowledge of the film, no trailers watched. I had a vague impression this would be a semi-serious horror comedy, but the film I watched leaned so heavily into beat-em-up style action comedy that I needed to recalibrate. Why be set in New Orleans if everyone has a different, stereotypical accent? Why are all of these actors simply playing themselves? Sure, in name and uniform Awkwafina is playing a police officer, but she’s also clearly playing an Awkwafina character. Nicolas Cage’s Dracula feels more like a vampire doing a silly Nicolas Cage impersonation. Ben Schwartz, who plays Tedward Lobo, the evil son of a crime family matriarch, is more Jean-Ralphio (Parks and Recreation) than John Gotti–which is not necessarily a complaint, it’s a character that I will always find funny. I was expecting something like a loving sendup of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), but instead got a mashup of the What We Do in the Shadows television series, the action sequences from Pineapple Express (2008), and a general kung-fu-buddy-cop vibe that is best likened to Rush Hour (1998). In order for the film to work its magic on me, I had to put away my notebook and stop thinking so much. Once I did that, I began to truly enjoy what I was seeing. 

Essentially, Renfield is a superhero movie with nebulously-defined heroes and villains. It’s a video game adaptation with no video game to precede it (actually, they have released a video game in conjunction with the movie, a total ripoff of the surprise indie smash Vampire Survivors titled Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood). In a nutshell, Nicholas Hoult plays the titular Renfield, the zany, unlucky-but-lovable familiar to Nicolas Cage’s Dracula, fending off human adversaries through superhuman strength acquired by eating bugs (a little artistic freedom from the original novel in which, yes, Renfield eats bugs, but he gains no powers from them) and spiriting Dracula away when he needs to rest. Through attending a series of group therapy sessions (fertile hunting grounds for Dracula’s meals), Renfield begins to see Dracula as a codependent narcissist who he must cut out of his life completely–a spin on the classic tale steeped deeply in our current zeitgeist, which I found to be a chuckle-worthy funny concept. He attempts to create his life anew, much to the dismay of his “master,” who begins enlisting some local baddies in New Orleans to do his bidding. This friction between Renfield and Dracula, good and evil, becomes the crux of the film, and while the comedy and general feeling of fun pervade most scenes, there are times when the seemingly-endless fight sequences feel like they’re taking up valuable real estate.

In a way, Renfield only makes sense in a landscape currently dominated by Marvel movies and AAA video games. Renfield can only claim his superpowers by eating bugs, an effective comedic plot device, but a mechanic which is, by Renfield’s own admission, ill-defined, and exists just to introduce tension into certain scenes. The locations within the film feel more akin to stages from Mortal Kombat than any real-world locales–what a waste of New Orleans as a background, I rarely felt the vibrancy and air of mystery of the city! Even the lair owned by the malevolent Lobo family is structured like endgame content, replete with martial-arts-trained henchmen and rounds of increasingly powerful and important sub-bosses to defeat before challenging Dracula himself. 

All that’s not to say there isn’t any depth to Renfield. Support groups, while a common object of derision in film, are given a much more loving ribbing here, as the movie showcases a comedic take on codependency and toxic relationships. The copious amount of computer-generated gore is a clear love letter to b-grade horror films–it was also a blast to watch, limbs wrenched from bodies, arms and legs used as clubs and javelins, what a hoot! My favorite moment in the movie came within the first five minutes, as Renfield describes how he became Dracula’s familiar in a hilarious take on Bram Stoker’s original story, and as he reminisces we see Cage and Hoult digitally inserted into an old black and white rendition of Dracula from 1931. Hoult holds his own as a comic actor, even if every time I look at his face all I can see is the little kid from About A Boy (2002). He and Awkwafina play off each other in a pleasant way, eliciting some genuine laughs, even if there is no romantic chemistry between them, regardless of how hard the movie attempts to force it. 

Speaking of forcing things, the movie generally struggled outside of its lively action sequences: a running bit about ska music felt so out of place that I found it more distracting than funny (even if I loved seeing a casual nod to The Slackers’ Vic Ruggiero on the big screen). Nicolas Cage as Dracula will be a divisive choice: if you like Cage’s current iteration as a living parody of his earlier career, then you’ll love him here as Dracula, but my take is that the role could have been better filled by a comedic actor who could have brought more to the film than Dracula, but make it Nic Cage. Renfield has all the hallmarks of a film that’s a fun romp if you catch it in its first year, but will be largely forgotten in a few years’ time.

My complaints aside, I left the theater smiling: Renfield was fun, exciting, and just great to look at. Nicholas Hoult continues his transformation into this era’s Hugh Grant, Awkwafina seems primed to enter into a new phase of her career (she’d be excellent in anything by Judd Apatow), and Renfield (the movie) was able to keep me entertained all the way through.