Just so we’re clear, I didn’t like the narration in this movie because I never like the narration in any movie. As examples go it was perfectly fine in and of itself, I don’t mind listening to Nicholas Hoult talk about things. I just don’t like narration in general. I don’t want to say something as severe as “narration is never a good idea” because there are plenty of examples where narration improves the movie (‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Wings of Desire,’ etc.), it’s just that all too often it acts as a crutch for the filmmakers. I have no proof, but I’m going to guess that well over half of the movies that use narration weren’t meant to, they had to fall back on it when they couldn’t make the movie work otherwise. Be it budget cuts, blown coverage, actor availability for reshoots, something else about the movie went wrong first and, in order to make a cut that’s at least somewhat coherent, sometimes you have to have the main character directly tell the audience what they need to know. I’m not saying for sure a lot went wrong here, I’m just saying there’s a lot of narration in this movie.
It’ll be interesting, in the future, to find out for which of Nicholas Hoult’s roles he’s most remembered. Or if he’s even remembered as a movie star. During the making and marketing of this movie all the talk was about Nicholas Cage, which is fair enough, his reengagement with the better side of Hollywood has been widely celebrated. I paid attention because of Hoult. Like everyone else, I really noticed him in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ although I’d been vaguely aware of him from ‘About a Boy’ and ‘The Weather Man.’ I eventually noticed he was one of the Beasts in the X-Men films and I’ve seen enough random clips of “Skins” that I’m sure I’ve seen his teenaged face but just never grokked it was him. This movie perked up my ears because I wanted to see what he could do as a film lead, unaware that he’s been that plenty of times before.
Looking over his filmography, it’s actually kind of impressive how many minor and completely forgettable movies he’s been in. In my mind he went directly from ‘Mad Max’ through the X-Men movies and “The Menu” and then right to ‘Renfield,’ but he was in four different, fairly unsuccessful movies in 2017 alone. I completely forgot he’s one of the leads in “The Great.” In my head he’s such a bigger star than reality shows him to be, although apparently Hollywood agrees with me for some reason and they keep trying to make him happen. He was supposedly one of the finalists to play James Gunn’s Superman. He’s in the next Robert Eggers and Clint Eastwood movies, fer chrissakes. He seems to be one of those likeable-enough actors that always manages to fail upwards, somewhat justified by the handful of pretty great performances he has given.
Anyway, he’s fine in this. Also fine is Nicholas Cage, which is only something of a shame. I’ve seen enough Cage movies to know there’s a sliding scale for rating his performances and it gets awesome at both ends. Normally a scale would go from good at one end to bad at the other, but for Cage the bad area is dead in the middle. This represents him doing his version of sleepwalking through a role, which means he simply performs the words and actions written in the script the way the director tells him to. Cage doesn’t ever get unprofessional, but he frequently does get bored. On one extreme of the scale we get his masterpiece performances, like in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ or ‘Pig.’ On the opposite extreme we get his other masterpiece performances, like in ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ or ‘Wild at Heart.’ His performance here is kind of halfway between the bland middle and ‘Mandy’ territory, he’s doing something with his performance, he’s making an effort, but the movie he’s in is too small in its way to handle any kind of massive effort, he’s forced to keep it reined in.
This movie originated as an idea from Robert Kirkman, he of zombies, who here receives a ‘screen story by’ credit. The difference between a ‘story by’ credit and a ‘screen story by’ credit, according to guild rules, is that the first is defined as writing "distinct from screenplay and consisting of basic narrative, idea, theme or outline indicating character development and action." The definition of the second is “If the [credited screen]writer is furnished source material of a story nature but takes from it only a springboard, a characterization, an incident, or some equally limited contribution, creating a substantially new and different story from the source material, the [original] writer may receive ‘Screen Story by’ credit.” This means that at some point Robert Kirkman pitched an executive on a movie that had Renfield as the protagonist instead of Dracula and then fucked right off. IMDB also insists that Ava Tramer provided ‘additional material.’ Considering her credits are almost entirely for tv comedies, she was clearly brought in to punch up the script.
The sole credited screenwriter is Ryan Ridley. Ridley kicked around the edges of television sci-fi and comedy for a number of years before drifting into the orbit of Dan Harmon, working on the last two seasons of “Community” and the first three seasons of “Rick and Morty.” This is his first theatrical screenplay. I’m genuinely unsure how much of this is his fault.
‘Renfield’ was directed by Chris McKay, who needs to decide what kind of director he’s going to be. He got his start on “Robot Chicken,” and so far his movies have lurched from ‘The Lego Batman Movie’ to ‘The Tomorrow War’ to this. Shades of Julius Avery here, little guy in the process of getting eaten by the studios. I haven’t seen either of his previous movies but hopefully they were more tonally deft than this one. The somewhat tortuous development process originally had Dexter Fletcher (‘Rocketman’) tipped to direct, which would have resulted in a very different movie. Fletcher had to drop out to develop another reboot of “The Saint,” which has yet to materialize. Maybe the studios have realized that they’d already achieved perfection with Kilmer.
This movie was apparently part of the troubled tangle of nonsense made up of the various attempts at establishing a Dark Universe for Universal Studios. Originally announced in 2014 in direct response to Marvel, this planned series of overlapping movies hit its first speedbump when ‘Dracula Untold’ underperformed. So they decided to pretend that one didn’t count. Said Dark Universe was then almost entirely killed off with 2017’s Tom Cruise-led ‘The Mummy,’ which also tanked. Buoyed somewhat by the success of 2020’s ‘The Invisible Man,’ and reportedly partly inspired by the continued success of “What We Do in the Shadows,” ‘Renfield’ finally came together and was released in 2023 to a very muted reaction. Its stated budget was $65 million and it only brought in roughly $27 million.
Considering we have credited writers who worked on “Community,” “Rick & Morty,” and “Harley Quinn,” as well as the director of ‘The Lego Batman Movie,’ this should have turned out way darker and funnier than it did. The major problem with this movie, which in general does kind of work in a minimally acceptable kind of way, is that it starts with such a fundamentally morally compromised protagonist that you have to grapple with a basic problem: as charming as Nicholas Hoult can be doing another variation on Hugh Grant’s screen persona from the 90’s, he’s playing a character who’s been involved in thousands if not tens of thousands of murders in the past hundred years. You either take that at least a little seriously or you blow up the rest of the movie to such cartoonish proportions that it starts to make sense in context. If you leave it mostly unaddressed it’s going to sit in the back of the audience’s mind, eating away at any enjoyment the rest of the movie earns.
The basic concept here is that it’s an alternate universe continuation of the 1931 Bela Lugosi-led ‘Dracula.’ Instead of Dracula killing Renfield and then dying to Van Helsing’s stake, the two of them survived and have just continued on to the present day. If you’re going to have a movie set contemporaneously you do need to decide which version of Dracula and Renfield you’re going to use, so as far as that goes this choice is fine, even interesting. I do wonder if it was this decision that drew Cage’s interest, because he’s talked up his love of classic vampire portrayals while doing press, or if he suggested it as a condition of his participation. This conceit doesn’t do much for Hoult, nobody remembers Renfield from the original, which is just as well because there he’s played by an American. The Renfield in the 1931 version takes a lot of the plot from Johnathan Harker, oddly enough. He’s the lawyer with the family who sells Dracula his house. This background informs Cage’s Dracula much more, as he takes Lugosi’s performance and portrayal as a jumping-off point. Hoult has exactly one scene where he briefly admits he willingly abandoned his entire family to become Dracula’s thrall, then it’s never brought up again.
As shown in the movie Renfield and Dracula have spent the intervening decades continually moving around, alternately committing atrocities and then fighting or fleeing vampire hunters. After defeating the latest and apparently last group of those, Dracula is injured again and needs to rebuild his power until his next unhinged feast, a cycle that Renfield has finally grown tired of. After stashing Dracula in an abandoned hospital, he finds himself attending an emotional support meeting for people in codependent relationships. He discovered the group after following a potential victim to it, and he finds the stories of the other attendees mirror his own situation. He starts to take steps to liberate himself from Dracula’s control, who eventually notices and decides to take revenge for the perceived betrayal. Eventually, with the help of a new friend, he confronts and kills Dracula and the movie ends as he looks forward to his new life.
There’s a whole lot of other plot shoved in there, but at base this is what the movie is about: Renfield extricating himself from Dracula’s thralldom. The mechanics of this influence aren’t super well-established. Dracula doesn’t have direct control over Renfield’s physical actions, but he can invade his mind and know his thoughts. As in every adaptation, Renfield eats bugs, except here they give him a super-hero like power up. The movie eventually establishes that this is something that happens for all of Dracula’s familiars, which means several more of those show up at the end of the movie so Hoult can have some fight scenes to wrap up the film.
To state it very plainly, as established in this movie Renfield is almost as morally culpable for all of Dracula’s murders as Dracula himself. Dracula spends the first forty minutes of the film confined to an abandoned hospital, depending on Renfield to bring him victims. Eventually Dracula is attacked by a group of mobsters (lot of plot shoved in) and as they fight we see literal piles of corpses scattered around, all victims brought there by our protagonist. Renfield occasionally narrates to the audience about trying to bring only bad people to Dracula, recently making a practice of tracking down and abducting only the abusive people in the lives of the members of his support group. Which is pretty horrifying. He’s also shown, on camera, only slightly reluctant to snatch an entire busload of cheerleaders. He’s only stopped from doing so by the sudden coincidental arrival of the police.
This, by itself, is not a dealbreaker. I watched too many seasons of ‘Dexter’ to get all upset about a serial killer protagonist. But for us to buy Renfield as even slightly sympathetic, the movie needs to do one of three things: establish that Renfield was under Dracula’s direct control and thus not morally culpable for the murders, establish that Renfield has had a moment of clarity and bitterly rejects the cowardice that caused his actions and now seeks to atone, or establish that the world of the movie is so morally chaotic that his actions don’t stand out as particularly evil by comparison.
The first is just boring. The second is a drama. The third is either a comedy or an action movie. This movie attempts to swing between the second and third and doesn’t do either one of them particularly well. It’s like ‘Bad Boys II’ without the courage to embrace what it is.
Beyond the names above the title, most of the budget of this movie must have gone to the special effects. Lots of blood and body parts in this movie, and most of them are played for laughs. At one point Renfield is in a restaurant when it’s attacked by mobsters. During the ensuing fight he takes a serving tray and lops off both of an attacker’s arms. A couple of minutes later, after the brawl, his budding romantic interest asks him, “Did I watch you cut a guy’s arms off with a decorative service platter?” and when he admits he did she replies, “It was awesome.” Why this is symptomatic of the death of comedy is a subject for another time, but it’s important to note that this is the meet-cute for the romantic comedy chunk of the movie. This is how we’re introduced to what is supposed to be the new central relationship in Renfield’s life, the one that will eventually lead him to defeat Dracula and free himself.
It almost works. The preceding action scene is straight out of ‘Deadpool,’ all superpowers, slow-motions shots, and startling bursts of fairly realistic gore. The violence is over the top enough and the subsequent reactions are muted enough that, together with some other exaggerated parts of this film, they might have gotten us to the point where handwaving away thousands of deaths over decades could have been a relatively small ask. Both Renfield and the cop, named Rebecca and played by Awkwafina, who is fine, were busy freaking out during the gunfight and so immediately afterwards are filled with adrenaline and slowly starting to remember all of the weird stuff they just saw each other do. Rebecca expresses admiration for how well he handled himself, and Renfield tells her how much he admired earlier how she stood up to the head of the mobsters, Tedward Lobo.
Which is why this all ends up not working, because of that preceding scene when she stood up to the mobster. Ted Lobo is played by Ben Schwartz as a variation on every character he’s ever played (I’m being harsh, he’s one of the best parts of the movie). In that scene Rebecca has a gun to her face as he taunts her about the way her father died. This scene is played completely straight and ends with Rebecca facing death with tears in her eyes. Then Renfield finally catches that fly he’s been chasing and the tone flips to action shenanigans, and then we get that rom-com bullshit dialogue from above.
As an aside, the character journey for Ted Lobo is pretty great if they actually meant to do it this way. He starts out as a comedy mobster terrible at crimes and prone to panic. Then it’s pushed too far and he’s so obviously inept yet inexplicably powerful in this demonstrably violent gang that it goes past funny into distracting. Then after it’s revealed he’s the mob boss’s son and the entire police department is farcically corrupt it kind of makes sense. He’s shown as utterly craven before Dracula, and then when he becomes his familiar he gets drunk with actual power for the first time in his life and starts killing at the drop of a hat. We as the audience also buy that he’s suddenly dangerous because we all know that kind of weasel and what they do with even a little bit of authority. Throughout the movie his domination by his mother is directly paralleled by Dracula’s hold on Renfield, and his utter glee at accepting service to Dracula directly clashes with Renfield’s fight to gain his independence. I didn’t think I’d buy Ben Schwartz as kind of intimidating but he pulled it off.
The best note I scribbled while I was watching this was ‘The emotions don’t read.’ Which means that I can tell what the characters are supposed to be thinking and feeling because these are good actors with competent direction, but they don’t resonate as genuine. I find Chris Pratt inexplicably annoying but when Starlord screamed at the apparent death of Rocket Raccoon, I bought it. When Gerard Butler had to take some time after that protracted fight scene in ‘Plane,’ I was with him. Hell, I bought the grudging respect between Fathers Amorth and Esquibel in that nonsense movie, I am a soft touch for these things. But because ‘Renfield’ shifted so jarringly between tones and without tracing linear emotional progressions I never really followed characters’ emotions or motivations from scene to scene. Here an example: Renfield tells Rebecca he thinks she’s a hero, something that means a lot to her. After plot has happened and Rebecca has arrested Renfield for murder, she’s confronted by the entire corrupt police force and offered a bribe. The camera lets us know that she resists temptation and stays honest only because she sees Renfield looking at her in admiration.
Which doesn’t work. At all. In this moment, Rebecca is still feeling betrayed and horrified after learning that Renfield is a murderer. Renfield just witnessed Dracula slaughter all of his friends and got arrested by the woman he has feelings for. He is not going to look admiringly at her in the middle of a standoff, and she is not going to draw strength from the gaze of someone she thinks is a mass-murderer. You can see the movie shoving the pieces together, you know what it’s trying to do, what shape it’s trying to make, but the pieces just don’t fit together and it shows. For a movie that claims to be about personal fulfillment and acceptance, it just slaps whatever emotions into whichever scenes depending on the needs of the plot.
Notice how much I haven’t written about Dracula? Or about what actually happens in the film? That’s because it’s yet another vampire crime movie. Do I have to point out the narrative advantages of having a relatively endless pool of victims for Dracula and foes for Renfield? Especially gangsters, who are officially marked by movie tradition as not really people, so we don’t have to care when they die. Several times during the movie the characters end up on or around head-high rounded mounds of corpses. It’s played for both laughs and scares, and it works exactly zero times for either. I think the movie recognized the need to build up an amoral world in which to smuggle Renfield’s forgiveness, I just don’t think it succeeded.
At around the half-hour mark, after Renfield has become entangled with mobsters but before that’s had a chance to catch up with him, Dracula announces he’s going to use his powers to take over the world. Cage’s Dracula kind of flits between being vaguely stupid, waspish, and genuinely intimidating. It must’ve been fun to play, but here it just means that Dracula says he’s going to conquer the world without even a hint as to how. It then kind of fades away while the plot moves on and the movie hopes we forget about it.
Eventually the vampire and the mobsters plots collide, Dracula learns that Renfield is trying to live a life apart from him, and without missing a beat he offers his services to the drug traffickers. This might only be part of his efforts to get revenge on Renfield, but maybe it’s also a part of that whole world-conquering thing? It’s left frustratingly vague. At a certain point it becomes clear that the only thing Dracula cares about is fucking with Renfield. Why he cares so much, however, isn’t clear. He’s shown easily making several more familiars, there’s no hint that Renfield is special in any way, I can see how after a hundred years you get used to a guy, but this does seem like a lot of effort when you could just snap his neck. There are any number of reasons they could’ve used, like Dracula realizing he’d grown fond of Renfield and thus was trying to destroy that part of himself, or he’d been wandering for so long he’d shed everything but his pride and to be betrayed after so long hurt him more than any shaft of sunlight, they could’ve made this work. Instead he just sees a photo of Renfield enjoying himself and he decides to swear eternal vengeance.
I dug around in the movie so much because it’s frustratingly hard to pin down exactly what went wrong. It’s not like the movie’s a failure, it does work as a narrative, it fulfills the basic function of a storytelling machine. The jokes are either funny to you or they’re not. For me too much of this falls into that category of jokes that make calling attention to themselves as jokes part of the joke, which I find insufferable. The performances are fine, Cage is having fun, Hoult is just doing Hugh Grant but it’s a good Hugh Grant, Ben Schwartz sleazes up surprisingly well, and everyone else in the cast is perfectly adequate. The emotional beats just didn’t work for me. Renfield being such a sunny innocent after a hundred years of murder struck me as wrong from the jump and it never quite came together. You can’t have a stammering guy who brings flowers to a police station just a few scenes after we saw him take out chloroform and a rag as he followed a group of teenage girls and expect the audience to follow that emotional throughline. If this was a CW show, sure, this could work over the course of three seasons (or a tight four-episode arc on “Vampire Diaries”), but if you try to do it in an hour and a half it’s asking too much of the audience with too little justification. When you lose the emotional connection to your characters, unless you’re in an out and out farce you lose a lot of what makes a movie compelling. Without that center all you’re left with are some competent fight scenes, some fairly intelligent and amusing conversations, and some performances that were all right. It’s the kind of movie that the nation as a whole decided to just catch on streaming, and unfortunately I can’t say they were wrong.
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