Director: Chris McKay
Writer: Ryan Ridley
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina
Synopsis: Renfield, Dracula’s henchman and inmate at the lunatic asylum for decades, longs for a life away from the Count, his various demands, and all of the bloodshed that comes with them.
The problem with Renfield doesn’t lie entirely with the filmmakers. It lies in the saturation of marketing that the film received. Two large action set pieces are prominent in every trailer the film had and are a shrug when the extended versions show up in the film. If you were seeing an R rated feature, it’s likely you got the red band version of the trailer, which gave an idea of the buckets of CGI blood involved in those set pieces and realized as you watch the full film that there isn’t more exsanguination than that. These trailers played so often that most of us could see every beat of every scene right before it happened. So if you were one of those that saw a few movies in a theater toward the end of last year, or into this one, you won’t be surprised at all.
Because what wasn’t shown in the trailers is rather dull. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) as a character isn’t very interesting. The parts of the film that attempt to give him nuance or backstory or a character arc are tepid. The characters that surround him are also ho hum given only one dimension to exist in. There are no stakes beyond something on the surface and that often gets buried in the excess of the violence.
Renfield would have been a lot more interesting if the filmmakers could have kept to practical effects. Yes, buckets of fake blood can be goofy, but at least the characters are actually covered in something. After one bloody brawl, Renfield and Rebecca (Awkwafina) walk away nearly clean in spite of the startling amount of spray that was taking place. It looked far goofier as a digital creation than something that could conceivably come from brutal mutilation. The film, as it continues, is one predictable point after another. This film really had so much promise in its beginning.
The opening narrative scene as Renfield describes to the audience how he made his way into Dracula’s (Nicolas Cage) employ is really well done. Director Chris McKay and cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen recreated several pivotal scenes from the 1931 Dracula. They’re lovingly rendered and elevate some of the scenes with modern techniques. Cage’s Bela Lugosi impersonation is just perfect.
If this film has redeeming qualities it’s in Nicolas Cage’s performance. From the stellar costumes by Lisa Lovass to the gruesome makeup and hair pieces by Corinne Foster, Miki Caporusso, Robin Myriah Hatcher, and their teams, everything about Dracula was fantastic. It would have been so much more enjoyable to see a full film of just this Dracula. Yes, we’ve seen Dracula dozens of times, but there is a beautiful alchemy between Cage’s gonzo approach and this titanic character. It would even have been more enjoyable to have a shot for shot remake of the 1931 version because Cage’s energy would have been something to behold with some of those dramatic moments.
Dracula is woefully underused in Renfield. It’s obvious why writer Ryan Ridley chose to highlight Renfield. It’s obvious why the filmmakers didn’t want to make just another Dracula story. Yet, it’s not obvious why they dug so shallowly into who Renfield might actually be. Renfield wants to be cool and it wants us to think it’s cool, different, and edgy, but it fails. There’s a reason Dracula has endured and why we haven’t felt the need to be familiar with Renfield before.
