Renfield (2023) – Bitingly Funny

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 6th April
Seen: 6th October

Ever since Bram Stoker printed his legendary novel Dracula, people have been doing wild and crazy things with the character. He’s one of the true greats of horror literature, the first Universal movie monster and a blueprint for pretty much every vampire that’s been used in modern media. He’s been the star of films, TV series, video games and even a musical. The uses for the character are endless and constant, hell a single chapter of the book ended up being made into The Last Voyage of the Demeter which is one of the best horror films of the year so it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of great ways to utilize this character and his world… and now, finally someone looked at the books and said “Wait, what about an entire film about Dracula’s butt monkey, Renfield?” and thus we get the absolutely glorious, sadly underseen, Renfield.

Renfield begins with the titular Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) sitting in the middle of a 12-step program for people dealing with codependent relationships. Turns out after nearly a century of being the servant to the dark master Dracula (Nicolas Cage), Renfield is starting to wonder if maybe he’s actually in somewhat of an abusive relationship and might need help to get out of it. Maybe Renfield could go from the guy who brings victims back to his dark master to feed on into something like a hero, which he tries to do by taking out some of the abusers he hears about at his meetings. 

There’s just one small problem, some of those abusers work for the Lobo cartel and killing them ends up angering Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) who now has a reason to hunt down Renfield. If Renfield wants to survive he’s going to have to team up with a local cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) who also happens to be trying to take down the Lobo cartel, something that’s a lot harder than it sounds because the Lobo family basically own the town, including all the police… oh and at some point the head of the Lobo cartel, Bellafrancesca Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo) teams up with Dracula in order to broaden her reach over the country. 

Renfield is so much of a cartoon that it should probably open with Renfield himself humming the tune of Merry Go Round Broke Down as he walks about the town. It is so pointedly over the top in just about everything it does, from the repeated violation of the fourth wall to the almost gleeful ignorance of the laws of physics to the gore that’s so heightened that similes do not exist to describe just how over the top it gets. Everything is designed to switch off your ability to take anything seriously and just have fun with what’s going on, and for the most part everything works according to that design because the sheer comical joy of everything that happens is contagious.

There isn’t a moment of subtlety in Renfield and that’s kind of what makes it so much fun, no one is holding back even a little and it works spectacularly for the kind of story being told. Indeed, anyone who expected subtlety from a movie where Nicolas Cage plays Dracula is clearly not going to be the audience for this kind of film. It’s a joke-a-minute campfest where every moment is filled with some form of joke, a lot of them just taking what made Dracula films scary in the 1930s and putting them into a modern context which renders them silly. Everyone plays up the comedy as much as possible, sticking with the idea that this is basically a cartoon but with real actors. It’s a joy to watch as everyone makes the most extreme choice every chance they get.

There are, admittedly, some mild tone problems that happen when Renfield tries to have a serious moment where Rebecca deals with her dead dad or they actually address the issue of abusive codependent relationships. Mostly the problem is that everything else surrounding those moments is so heightened and silly that their attempt at a more sincere moment almost feels like a joke in itself, isn’t it funny that the clowns are trying to do something serious? Each time it creates some serious whiplash and, in the end, almost doesn’t have any impact, Rebecca’s subplot about her dead dad feels like it could’ve just been about a cop fighting a corrupt force and had the same level of impact. The real attempts at sincere talks about abuse just ring a little flat when it’s followed by Renfield eating bugs like he was Popeye guzzling spinach to get some extra power.

Speaking of power, the two lead performances are a dream comedy duo for the ages. Nicholas Hoult as Renfield is genuinely spectacular, managing to play the sniveling worm with a heart of gold who wants to be a hero and break away from his abuser. It’s a reminder of just how good Hoult is as a comedic actor and frankly he should be being used more often for his comedic timing. It’s a performance that has to anchor all the insanity while also being completely batshit insane, somehow it works perfectly. 

The real powerhouse, and no one should be even a little shocked by this statement, is Nicolas Cage who delivers a gloriously high camp performance as Dracula. Holy hell, how the fuck have we as a society not demanded Nicolas Cage play Dracula before? How was this not a thing that happened decades ago because he was born to play this kind of role. Every single second that Nicolas Cage is on screen he is sucking the paint off the set before he eats it, it’s the kind of performance that you only get from Nicolas Cage operating on his own special level, it’s a performance made specially to show off every ounce of over-the-top flair that Cage contains. If we could convert the concept of camp into an energy source, Cage’s performance could power the southern hemisphere for the next decade, it’s that fucking perfect.

Renfield is a goddamn laugh riot, at least it is for people with a love for over the top zany parodies of classic horror (i.e. Me). Every minute has a new joke or set piece that’s designed to slap a smile over the audience’s face, every single choice made by the creative team is the most extreme choice you could get away with in a studio film. It’s the rare case of intentional camp that actually works on some level, a surprisingly fun time that’ll hopefully get rediscovered by a wider audience soon.