Nicolas Cage has played many different characters throughout his diverse—to put it mildly—acting career but unless I am blanking on something, he has never yet played the part of an authentic, genuine vampire. (Yes, he was in the great cult curiosity Vampire’s Kiss but in that, he was playing a guy who was convinced that he had been transformed into such a creature, even going so far as to sport plastic fangs.) With his latest effort, Renfield, he not only rectifies that oversight but finds himself playing the most famous vampire of them all, Bram Stoker’s immortal creation Dracula. Unfortunately, based on the available evidence of this grisly horror-comedy misfire, it appears that the makers of the film assumed early on that by casting Cage in the role, they hardly needed to do anything else.
The title refers to Renfield (Nicolas Hoult), the one-time lawyer who journeyed to Dracula’s castle long ago as part of a real estate deal and found himself becoming the count’s so-called “familiar,” tending to his needs, protecting him during the daylight hours in which he is vulnerable and, most importantly, procuring fresh bodies for him to feed upon. As the film opens, Dracula and Renfield have relocated to New Orleans, where they reside in an abandoned hospital and where Renfield, who gets a portion of his master’s strength after eating bugs, tracks and hunts down lowlifes to feed to his boss (who prefers the blood of the innocent, of course) while attending support group meetings for people in co-dependent relationships as a way of trying to come to terms with his life. Needless to say, Dracula is not particularly thrilled by this development and finds himself aligning with a far-more ruthless underworld crime family (headed by Shoreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz) as part of his plan to conquer and consume the world while Renfield tries to make things right with the unwitting aid of an honest cop (Awkwafina) who initially deems him to be a hero when he gruesomely kills a bunch of bad guys during an attack but who is much less sure when she discovers who he really is.
In essence, Renfield is a two-joke affair—the jokes being the idea of looking at the relationship between a vampire and their familiar through a modern psychological perspective and the idea of Cage playing Dracula, albeit in what is essentially a supporting turn. The first joke doesn’t really work because it is a comedic conceit that has been explored a number of times throughout the years, most notably in the hilarious film and television show What We Do in the Shadows, and the screenplay by Ryan Ridley doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. As for Cage, he certainly throws himself wholeheartedly into the part, I suppose, but thanks to the general triteness of the material, he is never particularly scary or funny, and while he does look the part, you can barely understand what he is saying half the time, presumably due to the elaborate set of super-pointy teeth that he sports throughout. Meanwhile, the usually appealing Hoult and Awkwafina are largely wasted in thinly written roles—the former mostly mopes wanly while the latter is given little to do other than make exclamations describing things that we have just seen. Meanwhile, director Chris McKay tries to disguise the hollow nature of the story by amping up the gore to levels that are absurd without being funny and grisly without being particularly scary or memorable.
Renfield is one of those movies where you come away from it feeling confusion rather than irritation over the way that the filmmakers have managed to take a seemingly foolproof concept and muck it up. My guess is that you could probably come up with a more inspired film that could use this one’s basic premise in a more unique manner that didn’t require the need of a bloodthirsty gangster family for additional thrills. (If you must mix your vampires with mobsters, look instead to John Landis’s intriguing and underrated Innocent Blood.) There is one very funny moment early on in which we see clips from the 1931 film of Dracula with the faces of Cage and Hoult superimposed onto Bela Lugosi and David Manners to depict the early days of their relationship and while he is ultimately let down by the material, Cage certainly gives the part his all and then some. Beyond that, however, Renfield proves to be one squandered opportunity after another that not even Cage’s efforts can begin to justify. Put it this way—if you see only one Dracula-related film this year including the participation of an Oscar-winning member of the extended Coppola family, you should put a stake, or at least a pin, through Renfield and make it the 4K of Bram Stoker’s Dracula instead.