Century of the Vampire: Renfield (2023)

Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.

Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 1995 Mel Brooks film Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Today, he looks at the 2023 Chris McKay film, Renfield. This article will contain spoilers.

I remember seeing ads for Renfield when it came out and liking the concept -- Nicolas Cage can do an excellent genre Dracula in his sleep and Nicholas Hoult is a perfectly acceptable pretty boy wilting flower leading man, which is what you need for the Renfield role if Renfield is going to be the main character (and he should be, in the movie bearing his name) -- but being unclear on what exactly the value proposition here was of having these people in it. Was this some kind of comedy? There seemed to be a lot of action in the trailer. How precisely do you make a film out of “I’m in an abusive relationship with Dracula and want out” with the light and airy tone they seemed to be aiming for?

With a whole lot of crime genre B plotting, it turns out. There’s a superhero movie somewhere in here with Renfield himself as the lead and Dracula as his supervillain boss/father/what have you -- my initial take was that it felt like a worse version of the relationship between the main character and his father in Invincible, and then I noticed that the film was based on a pitch by Invincible creator Robert Kirkman -- but it comes and goes in the first 30 minutes until being entirely subsumed by a “Dracula takes over the mob and the corrupt cops” story that takes us much of the rest of the way.

That logline is both broadly correct but also missing something, not because it’s too reductive but because…Dracula doesn’t really care about the mob, either? The plot is very thin. The idea is that this movie takes place in the same fictional universe as Dracula 1931, with very specifically that Dracula and that Renfield, and since the events of that movie the pair have been moving from city to city, killing a bunch of people out in the open, with Renfield setting them up at Master’s behest and Dracula knocking them down. Obviously this attracts the attention of local hunters, who almost-but-not-quite kill Drac, and he and Renfield skulk away into the shadows and take their act to another city. In the case of our picture, New Orleans.

It doesn’t feel much like New Orleans, which has nothing to do with the shooting or location choice -- this film was in fact shot in New Orleans. The entire film just has such a heightened sense of reality, and not in a good way, that instead it feels like a fake city from a superhero comic book. Very shortly after Renfield reveals his superpowers -- he can eat bugs to gain superstrength, speed, and limited flight, and mostly uses it to dismember villains dressed like open world video game enemies into cartoon gore -- when killing the abusive boyfriend of a member of his support group for victims of abusive relationships (the framing device of much of this film) the movie suddenly becomes a cheap, silly crime drama about Officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), the one good cop in the New Orleans Police Department, who keeps chasing down Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), the heir to the Lobo crime family, only for him to get released by the obviously corrupt cops. This is communicated to us by him throwing kilos of cocaine back at Quincy during a footchase as a comedy bit, getting caught, brought in, confessing to an empty room, and then getting released with no charges and flipping off all the cops as he walks out a free man. There is, I suppose, a version of these comedy beats that works; it probably isn’t in the Nic Cage Dracula vehicle, where Nic Cage Dracula should be stealing the show with Nic Cage Dracula things. Schwartz is a very funny guy and while I’m rather cool on Awkwafina in general as a performer, she is not the limiting factor on her character here. But none of this actually works in the movie itself.

While way too much screentime is being devoted to the crime stuff, Renfield and Drac are growing further apart because Dracula is an insane genuinely evil mass murderer who dreams of being a genocidaire, and Renfield is a good egg who wants to wear colorful clothes and have a nice normal life, but has made some bad decisions and is in a relationship with an abuser. At first I thought the movie was taking the piss on the abuse metaphor, but no, it’s very serious about that. And to be clear, I prefer that to the alternative in a vacuum, but if you’re making a movie about Renfield and Dracula actually being an abusive, codependent relationship, you can’t also have it be the happy fun jokes movie, because then the scene halfway through where Dracula murders the entire support group on screen doesn’t land as well. Or at all. (And don’t worry, the movie doesn’t even have the confidence of its convictions here; every Good Guy who gets hurt or killed in the film’s runtime gets brought back to life in the end using Drac’s blood as a macguffin.)

Like again: I’m not saying the movie should be serious, and that would make it good. I’m saying the levels are way out of whack all over the place, and lead to an unsatisfying viewing experience. I am at least glad it’s a slim 93 minutes; it leads to Drac’s master plan not really going anywhere and the world domination scheme not being all that sketched out before he gets killed by Renfield believing in himself and ending the cycle of abuse (and Rebecca learning the holy ritual scene in a flashback earlier offscreen, from “Wiccan Tumblr”), but who cares. A hair over ninety minutes is just enough time for this thing to squeeze all the juice it was interested in squeezing out of the concept and, more importantly, letting Nic Cage screw around.

This is the thing I was pleased about in this film: It wasn’t a “fly Nic in for one day, shoot his stuff, then shoot the other 80 minutes of the movie around his two scenes” affair. He still should have been in the film more than he was, but that’s mostly a problem with the writer and director putting confidence behind a bad and uninteresting crime plot (that still features the excellent Shohreh Aghdashloo as the matriarch of the Lobo family, given the thankless job of trying to tie those scenes together as the villain of that arc). Hoult’s Renfield is obviously his primary partner, but everyone gets a turn to do a scene or two with Nic; Ben Schwartz has the most fun with it, both because of and in spite of the character he’s playing -- Teddy Lobo becomes the new Renfield, of course, as Dracula realizes his old familiar wants to be a real boy again and he needs a new henchman.

The effects look good! Well, the costuming and makeup effects look good, and their CGI touchups and enhancements work really well. The gore in the action scenes…this is an issue I have with Kirkman’s Invincible as well, where I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to take this fondness for and frankly fidelity to cartoonish super-gore. This looks a lot like clips I’ve seen of that Invincible cartoon with people getting limbs ripped off and screaming as blood goes everywhere, heads flying around, so on and so forth. If I was taking this seriously, these people would be freakish monsters. But it’s impossible to take it seriously! It’s so goofy! Renfield in particular is constantly going “Ah, geez” as he lops off a limb here and opens up a neck there. At least when Dracula is murdering people you get the sense he’s having fun, instead of getting the feeling the main reason he isn’t doing the Office Jim face at the camera is because blocking off time for him to look into the camera would ruin the flow of the fight. Otherwise the action’s pretty well done; very obviously Wick inspired with the digital shortcuts that come with that, especially when Quincy is shooting people, but I’ve won the battle over “no one uses squibs anymore” against myself. It’s fine.

One thing I will say for the film is it’s not a difficult watch. It goes down much more easily than a bunch of the other movies we’ve done for this column, some of them better and some of them worse. You get the stipulated amount of Nic Cage Dracula; they don’t shortchange you on that. But they could have done better. Or at least done worse, more ambitiously.

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Tags: century of the vampire | renfield