In Renfield, Nicholas Hoult is a delight as Dracula’s much-abused personal assistant. But even Nicolas Cage as the Count himself can’t keep the movie on track.
Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage star in Renfield. (Universal Pictures)
Renfield, a comedic spin-off of sorts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focuses not on the count himself but his frazzled, long-suffering servant played by Nicholas Hoult (The Great, The Favourite). Here, Hoult’s lowly Renfield has finally had enough of his toxic work under his boss Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and has even started attending group therapy sessions to deal with his codependency issues. Applying wimpy therapy jargon to the satanic blood-feasting dominance of the world’s most ruthless vampire generates a number of very funny scenes, and both lead actors bring their all to their roles.
It’s no surprise that Cage, reveling in the bleeding edge of performance style that goes way back to his early roles in films like Birdy (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), and Vampire’s Kiss (1989), makes an enthusiastically campy meal of playing the Dark One. Decked out in his cape, top hat, cane, and ornate jewelry, he swanks into rooms full of dull, scared, dressed-down contemporary Americans and stuns them all with his aristocratic grandiosity and mesmerizing way of chewing on full sentences as he speaks them. That’s before his eyes turn red and he bares his fangs and goes “full Cage” on the gonzo line, “L-l-l-let’s eat!”
Cage has also made it clear he’s got a big thirst to play the role again, so this movie counts as something of an audition for future work.
As for Hoult in Renfield’s title role, he’s been a gem of an actor since childhood, holding his own opposite Hugh Grant, Rachel Weisz, and Toni Collette in About a Boy (2002), a romantic comedy. He really ought to be a bigger star by now. He’s handsome and effortlessly charming with wicked comic timing, and he can play drama beautifully as well. He’s got it all, including a major role in Robert Eggers’s upcoming remake of Nosferatu, in which he plays Thomas Hutter. (That’s the Jonathan Harker character in the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. It was changed to Thomas Hutter in F. W. Murnau’s legendary unauthorized 1922 adaptation, Nosferatu, in order to avoid copyright infringement.) Hutter’s the hapless solicitor who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal on a nice piece of property in London, which will unfortunately place Dracula’s new home quite near to Hutter’s own, where his wife lives, a romantic-looking young woman whose “lovely neck” Dracula admires.
To further complicate the tangle of adaptations, in Renfield there’s a great black-and-white sequence showing us how R. M. Renfield was first recruited by Dracula back in the nineteenth century. It’s essentially footage from the old Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning, but with the faces of Cage and Hoult digitally transferred onto those of Dracula/Bela Lugosi and Renfield/Dwight Frye. In the 1931 film, it’s Renfield who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal, rather than Harker. Renfield escapes as a weak partial vampire and a raving lunatic, soon committed to an asylum where he lives on the blood of insects, raves about the coming of Dracula, and awaits further orders from his boss.
These early scenes are the best in the movie, though Renfield returns to form again at the very end as soon as Renfield returns to group therapy. It’s the broad middle that sags with too-damn-much plot and tiresome business, and perhaps that’s one reason why the film is doing badly with the same ticket-buying public that’s racing out to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie instead.
There’s a lot of guff about a zealous cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) who’s trying to bring down the Lobo crime family in corrupt New Orleans, a crime family led by the bumbling son Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) of a formidable old-world mother Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Rebecca’s incorruptible policeman father was murdered by the Lobos, and this traumatic event has estranged Rebecca from her sister Kate (Camille Chen) while . . .
You see what I mean? Blah blah blah, who cares? There had to be some better way to get Awkwafina and Nicholas Hoult together as an odd couple fighting Dracula shoulder-to-shoulder, but sadly screenwriter Ryan Ridley and director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken, The Lego Batman Movie) couldn’t think of it.
Given this sinking under narrative weight, the action scenes are a welcome relief. They’re cartoonishly gory, and generally played for comedy. This Renfield isn’t a gibbering weakling as in the 1931 Dracula. He gets supernatural strength from eating bugs and thinks nothing of beheading somebody with a bar tray or ripping off their arms and using them as weapons to beat others to death. An elderly couple walked out of the screening I was attending early on, mid–fight-scene — so be warned! Geysers of blood!
The comedy gold is all in the Renfield-in-group-therapy premise, which makes fabulous sense, really. After all, Count Dracula already represents the vampiric relationship of the aristocratic elite to the working classes, regularly draining peasants out in Romanian hills and then moving on to the London upper middle class. At any rate, it’s an easy leap to make Dracula a kind of ultimate abusive boss, with unbeatable power over a lowly personal assistant, even one who’s been in enough therapy sessions that he thinks he’s ready to “take his power back.” There’s nice commentary on the terribly weakened condition of American labor when everyone in group therapy assumes Renfield is talking about just another ordinary capitalist boss, not a supernatural monster.
“You feel like he could destroy you with just a snap of his fingers, don’t you?” commiserates one working stiff.
“He wouldn’t even need to snap his fingers,” says Renfield, and everyone in the group nods understandingly.
If only the plot had spun out from that ingenious scenario, there would’ve been no need for the strenuous addition of cops and crime families. Why couldn’t Awkwafina have been in group therapy too, another of the downtrodden turning to psychiatry and twelve-step programs and the self-care industry for help?
Before it veers off, Renfield is right on the cusp of a nicely rollicking satire of the huge distance between the monstrous material conditions we need addressed, and the sad emotional maladjustments therapy is prepared to address. So many of us who’ve been in therapy know perfectly well that it can’t possibly deal with our main problems, which are all about economic injustice — working too hard and long for too little pay. As a direct result, we’re perpetually exhausted, sick, and depressed. Fix all the immense glaring social problems and the therapy numbers would be guaranteed to drop like a rock.
But we’re so overburdened, we’ve got to go somewhere, talk to someone. These days, we’re all eady to process our trauma, challenge our own negative self-talk, and learn to care for our inner child.
That’s all fine, no doubt. But what we really need is to quit our horrible jobs and leave this insane nation designed for the pleasure and prosperity of a not-altogether-dissimilar class of bloodsucking vampires. When Renfield hits those notes — and it does quite often — it’s a pleasure that, sadly, resonates with far too many of us.