'Renfield' Review: Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult Odd Vampire Couple Comedy is all Blood No Bite
Renfield
R: For bloody violence, some gore, language throughout, and some drug use
Runtime: 1 Hour and 32 Minutes
Production Companies: Skybound Entertainment, Giant Wildcat
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Director: Chris McKay
Writer: Ryan Ridley
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Adrian Martinez, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Release Date: April 14, 2023
In Theaters Only
Serving as an assistant to a Universal monster horror icon for all eternity must be a draining curse. They must tend to their master’s every need, helping them conduct murder and mayhem, getting no credit for their glory. It’s like being a home health aide without getting any pay or health insurance. Like Igor to Victor Frankenstein, those abused and manipulated sidekicks always wind up with the short end of the stick. In Renfield, Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s overlooked assistant searches for his independence to familiar comedic results.
After a century of serving, Robert M. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is drained from his blood-sucking toxic relationship, working as a slave to the ruthless Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage). Living in the underbelly of New Orleans, Renfield attends anonymous group meetings for people in toxic codependent relationships to understand his own and serve vigilante justice by taking out bad people to give to his boss for dinner. Thanks to Drac, Renfield obtains superhuman strength for a small window of time when he consumes bugs. One of Renfield’s crime-fighting efforts attracts mob prince Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) and his mob-boss mom Ella (Shohreh Aghdashloo). He lands himself at the crossroads of the mob and the heart of Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a hard-edged police officer who wants justice for Lobo's hand in her dad’s murder. Even worse, Renfield’s crime streak pisses off Dracula's desires for innocent flesh. Stuck between serving an injured Dracula and his self-interest, Renfield must make up his mind and find his strength by breaking up with Dracula and realizing his heroism.
Whenever Nicholas Hoult stars in a project doused in heavy powdered makeup, you know he’s getting his eccentric weirdo on. His roles in films such as Warm Bodies, The Favourite, and Mad Max: Fury Road are a testament to the passion he pours into his charisma and cartoonish physicality. Nick Hoult paired with friggin’ Nic Cage as Dracula is Renfield’s main draw and strength. Their relationship bears many similarities to other familiar/vampire relationships, specifically Guillermo and Nandor on What We Do in the Shadows (the series), not adding anything fresh to this codependency examination. Hoult’s idiosyncratic submissiveness clashing with Cage’s egotistical Dracula lends the comedy to itself.
Nic is as uncaged as a campy Nic Cage character could be, having a delightfully bloody time adding his distinguished flavor to a dehydrated-sounding, sassy, self-centered Dracula. Hoult holds a Victorian dialect with awkward physicality that never ages out of style est. Warm Bodies. While engaged in eccentric thespian couple banter, their comedic styles and wide expressionism keep Renfield’s soul pumped with adrenaline. The best comedic beats come from their wisecracks and toxic power dynamic.
Director Chris McKay is best known for his animation background, working as a director on episodes of Robot Chicken and helming The Lego Batman Movie. McKay recently threw his hat into the live-action ring, helming the Chris Pratt-led sci-fi action flick The Tomorrow War and now this horror action comedy. It’s been a minute since McKay worked on an animated project, but he found a way to make those claymated blood spurts on Robot Chicken into reality.
Each on-screen kill prompts a big bucket of thick, ketchup-colored, stylized blood, and the gore is thrown in your face, working on the same cartoonish physics of Robot Chicken. Like his last film, McKay expands his eye for action, dishing out exciting set pieces through kinetic camera movement and space usage. As he relishes graphic horror for this project, McKay incorporates practical effects for his blood and gore spurts, adding weight and thrill to the action sequences.
The film’s makeup team gives Nic Cage’s Dracula a mixture of recognizable and grotesque. There are some nightmare fuel imageries to Drac throughout his journey to regain his health. While disturbing, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the makeup applied to his horrific deformed body.
Renfield bears an exciting concept on paper but fumbles with its execution. Like its titular lead, the film can’t find a consistent identity. The screenplay, provided by Ryan Ridley (who penned some of the best Rick and Morty episodes), supplies a simple characterization devoid of bite. Renfield himself isn’t as eccentric or funny, underestimating the height of Hoult’s comedic potential. I tried hard to refrain from drawing comparisons between this and the What We Do in the Shadows series but damn it, Renfield needed some meat added to its diluted blood. The comedy is often frustratingly straightforward, with the laughs hardly landing when not emphasized by the violence, Nic Cage doing Nic Cage with fangs, and comedic actors like Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz ad-libbing. McKay’s action direction compensates for the lack of character and humor.
The story attempts to be a character piece about an assistant trying to find his inner strength and noticing his source of abuse. Yet, it’s steamrolled by a generic crime subplot that hardly works with the premise. Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz are good in uncharted roles: determined cop/love interest and evil mobster/avoiding a blue wardrobe, which should be a sin against humanity. Awkwafina is the most grounded character, for she’s a hard-working police officer busting her ass to bring the Lobo mob family to justice, contrasting Renfield’s uncertain good/bad identity. Whenever her sub-plot is centralized, it throws the cartoonish zaniness of the tone a grounded curveball. She and Hoult are strangely adorable together, especially as she delivers constant deadpan and dominant confidence that bounces off his shy demeanor. They share nice romantic tension, but their potential is robbed by bizarre dialogue. Rebecca offers many surface-level tangents about the definition of heroism to Renfield that gets frustratingly repetitive.
Albeit having a short runtime, the relationship between the victimized assistant hardly holds any water outside of the surface-level abuse. Renfield’s shoddily edited, mad-dashing plot elements that are unexplained. The opening follows Renfield and Drac’s first encounter, tackling the noir style of classic ‘30s Universal monster flicks. The weird ADR work and snappy quick editing rob the viewer of marinating in McKay’s stylistic efforts and the power dynamic between the Stoker characters. It actively takes the narrative shortcuts using Renfield’s voiceover narration to rapidly get the film from scene to scene, resembling a kid doing a report last minute and using SparkNotes to give him details.
Renfield prospers from Nic Cage and Nicholas Hoult biting down on their distinctive charisma and comedy, supplying blood to this stylized horror comedy. But the lack of meat within the characters and story prevents it from reaching the height of its unholy potential.
