“What if Dracula’s long-suffering, bug-eating lunatic henchman Renfield finally got fed up with the abuse wrought unto him by his master, and decided to quit?” is, objectively, a very good premise for a movie. It’s got the three best things a movie can have: room for a rich character arc, a clear source of conflict, and Dracula.
“What if Renfield goes to a support group for people in abusive or dysfunctional relationships, and his new friends help him on a journey of self-discovery and encourage him to leave Dracula?” is another good idea, a good way to develop this premise, love it. Additional good ideas include,”what if this movie is styled after and positioned as a sequel to Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula?” and “what if the film were set in an extra-gothic New Orleans?” and “what if Nicolas Cage played Dracula?”
Those are good ideas! They are good ideas! And I will probably be shouting about how good they are, over and over, into the corner of my cell in the Victorian sanitarium where I will remain for the rest of my days, after having watched Renfield, the utterly-maddening new film from Chris McKay that asks all these good questions and then discards them to become a buddy cop comedy about taking down a local mob family.
Yes, if there is anything in this world that might finally cause me to dispense with my sanity, it is witnessing the utter wastefulness, the brazen squandering of promise perpetrated by Renfield. My review might easily end here, but here are the details, if you want them.
In this film, Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield, Dracula’s meek familiar, his tractable factotum. He does everything the Count needs, including bring him people to exsanguinate. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, Renfield is more of a plot device, an inmate at a county sanatorium whose strange behavior is a harbinger of Dracula’s arrival, and who is conveniently positioned to help Dracula ambush some of the vampire hunters.
Most Dracula movies have struggled with what to do with Renfield, with Tod Browning’s 1931 movie switching Renfield with Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who travels to the Carpathians in the novel’s first section to help the Count (a new client) buy an English estate. In this movie, which stars Bela Lugosi as Dracula, the amazing Dwight Frye plays Renfield as an affable, simple-minded worker who easily falls under the sway of the Count’s hypnotic abilities, and becomes his unhinged, raving servant.
Renfield (produced by Universal Pictures, the studio that produced Dracula ninety-two years before) is such a sequel to Browning’s movie that the beginning actually is in black-and-white, with Cage and Hoult edited in to the film’s original scenes, replacing Lugosi and Frye. (This is a fun touch and there should have been more scenes like this!) Renfield begins nearly a century later, with that character deep in crisis, mostly because he never wanted to be in this position, but also because Dracula… well, he’s a real pain in the neck. He’s manipulative, needy, sadistic, heartless… and one day after stumbling into a support group for people dealing with co-dependency and toxic relationships, Renfield realizes that this is what he’s been dealing with for all these years.
While he wrestles with how to wrest himself from his master, with encouragement from the group’s coordinator Mark (a very funny Brandon Scott Jones), the story taps open a new narrative vein and starts to hemorrhage. There is a police officer named Rebecca Quincey (Awkwafina) who is The Only Good Cop in New Orleans (the city where Dracula and Renfield are living now). The city is run by an ambiguously-European crime dynasty, the Lobos, headed by Shohreh Aghdashloo (great but misused; she should play a vampire) and her dumbass son Teddy (Ben Schwartz).
Why the writers felt they needed to merge its Dracula plot with a story about the restoration of a police department is beyond me.Renfield accidentally winds up somewhere where the gangsters are going to assassinate Rebecca and he falls in love with her/is impressed by her courage and refusal to be bought, and so he beats up all the gangsters. Oh, where Renfield differs from Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula is that, Dracula gives Renfield a tiny bit of his power, which he activates by eating bugs (the bottom-of-the-ladder counterpart to eating humans), and then his eyes glow and he turns into Neo from the Matrix, super-fighting his way to victory. So he does this to save Rebecca and she’s impressed.
At this point (practically a third of the way through), the film becomes about how Renfield wants to redeem himself by helping Rebecca on her quest to free the city from the grip of this crime family, and his issues with Dracula shift to a subplot. Low level-criminal Teddy Lobo endures while the Count lies in wait. That Dracula, one of the most significant fictional villains of all time, winds up competing for A-villain status with “some guy we’ve never heard of before” is a huge miscarriage of writing.
Taking a supernatural concept that is inherently sumptuous with potential and turning it into a cop show is a bit of a common thing, these days; shows from iZombie to Lucifer to Sleepy Hollow assume that if someone is granted magical abilities or a legendary demon decides to spend time on earth, that person is going to want to use their powers to help the police solve crimes.
It makes more sense for a TV series to fall back on the repetitive structure of the procedural, but Renfield is a tight 93 minutes! Why the writers felt they needed to merge its Dracula plot with a story about the restoration of a police department is beyond me. (As the editor of a crime fiction website and someone who wrote a doctoral dissertation on detectives but also just someone who likes good storytelling, please please hear me when I say that not every story needs to be a mystery! I’m begging you! I’m on my knees.)
Renfield might not know who he is, but his movie needs to. Tonally, it oscillates from silly to grave, appropriately bloody to stupidly disgusting. Awkwfina gives it her all, but Rebecca, as a character, is a boring figure we’ve seen a thousand times before, and feels like a placeholder for a good character idea that never came. She wants to avenge the death of her father, Another Good Cop… you get it. The cinematic version of lorem ipsum.
It’s almost painful, especially because the film’s high points are quite high indeed. It didn’t have to be this way! I’ve mentioned already that Nicolas Cage (a noted Dracula aficionado) plays the Count, and he does it with relish and a pair of genuinely very scary dentures. In a horror-comedy like this, you’re going to want your Dracula not to merely chew the scenery, but suck it all dry, and Cage does this, vigorously animating a monster who is both suitably scary and silly, grotesque and goofy. He has menace, he has style, he has a strange and entrancing magnetism. He wears sequined blazers sometimes, like a Mardi Gras partygoer from hell. It works, what can I say?
Nicholas Hoult is funny and compelling as Renfield, although he plays him more like a forlorn, awkward, old-timey gentleman than a wide-eyed maniac (and I would have liked to see the latter, but that’s just me). He’s wonderful. The best scenes in the movie are the ones that develop the relationship between him and Dracula, spend time stewing in the uniqueness of their situation. Dracula has taken up residence in an old abandoned mental hospital and hung dried blood bags from the ceiling; why don’t we get to explore this resplendently creepy place, the world they have created? Why don’t we get more black and white flashbacks that play with the cinematic forebear it acknowledges?
And most importantly, why don’t we get the vampire relationship comedy we were promised? Why, when faced with an unbelievably rich source text, does the film not sink its teeth all the way in?
These are the questions I will be muttering to myself until the day I die, banging my little cup on the bars of my sanatorium cell, cursed forever by a Dracula movie that forgot about its own stakes.
