Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage) has been traveling the world for hundreds of years, chased from town to town, country to country, as his blood-consuming diet begins to cause questions among the residents.  All the while, he is accompanied by his familiar, Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), a lawyer who has been with Dracula since the first sale of land back in Transylvania.  Now, the pair arrives in New Orleans, and as Renfield begins to collect new victims to satiate his master’s appetite, he becomes unwittingly entangled in the corruption of the Lobo’s Drug Empire, thus placing Rebecca (Awkwafina), a police officer with a personal vendetta against the Lobos, hot on his tail. 

Drawing on the wealth of tropes and motifs from the Dracula legend, Chris McKay directs Renfield, a horror comedy penned by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman for Universal Pictures.  The 93-minute feature fulfills a life-long dream of its star, Cage, to play the famed Count, however, he largely takes on a supporting role in this film which is instead steered by the title familiar.  That being said, Cage still finds plenty of opportunities to chew the scenery and revel in his made-for-meme antics that have made him such a beloved modern icon in certain circles.  While well-versed in the lore of both Cage and Dracula, it is nowhere near as meta as last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), and unfortunately fails to capitalize on either of its subjects thereby leaving audiences with little to grasp on to as the narrative topples into the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. 

In the title role, Hoult is saddled with a massive voice-over narration that helps to set up the rules of the film, explaining his powers, and giving us insight into how he selects his victims.  It is poorly conceived dialogue, and the actor is stuck talking for minutes on end without a single joke landing as intended.  He works better in the story proper when he is allowed to interact with other characters instead of just narrating, but the script still struggles with its attempts at humor.  It places most of its efforts on the larger-than-life absurdity of the situation to draw out some laughs and then forces its title character to act as the straight man of the whole comedy while allowing Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) the room to go wild.  Hoult does what he can, and it is hard to blame the actor for a script that offers nothing to the role. 

Next to him is Awkwafina’s Rebecca, a similarly confusing and weak role that gets the best of its actress.  Her role is written with one-note comedy surrounding her anger issues at being stuck doing traffic stops instead of out in the field preventing real crime – like bringing in the Lobo family who we learn murdered her father.  It is an abrasive role by nature, and because it is so bluntly written and underdeveloped, Awkwafina is unable to coax audiences into her story; instead, she just shuts down when she is through with her screaming antics and stares blankly around the set.  She seems to have given up on the role in many sequences, either unsure of how to handle the part or not bothered enough to try and that this same aspect affects so many of the performances in the film, it is more indicative of unsure direction from McKay than just poor casting. 

Cage is the only one who has anything to build a character off of, and much of that is also because he can lean into the overarching lore of the character.  He is given the most to do on the page and Cage is quick to bring his iconic eccentricities to the character. The film is at its best in the later throws when he is allowed to take command of the screen, and the actor knows it too, sauntering around in his vampiric outfit and being allowed to vamp and monologue about the famed Prince of Darkness (woo!) but because he is in a supporting role, it is not enough to carry the film and we must endure long chucks of the story exploring a budding romance between Renfield and Rebecca.

Despite the fumbling on the page, Mitchell Amundsen’s camera is quite dynamic as it flies through the extended action sequences even if McKay has opted to filter everything through a sickly – and frankly, ugly – green light. The schtick of the film is that after eating bugs, the familiar is given a temporary power boost to help overwhelm his victims for Dracula. The fight sequences then are very over the top, as limbs are ripped and torn from their torsos and wielded as weapons and heads pop like water balloons spouting out gallons of blood across the frame. As with the humor of Renfield, the action is similarly one-note so once the novelty has worn off after the first bloated sequence, there are no other tricks up McKay’s sleeves, and he is left with little else to offer his audiences. It is almost as if he had grown bored with the idea, and that same feeling infected the cast who, besides Cage and Schwartz, seem to just be going through the motions with great apathy.

Renfield presents an interesting avenue into the Dracula legend, but tonally it seems to be all over the place, though it is understandable that the filmmakers would want to shake off the easy temptation of doing just another horror film. While Stephen Sommers beat McKay to the punch with a campy, bloody Dracula tale in his Van Helsing (2004), Renfield as a film, like the character himself, is far too unsure of what it wants to be. Shaken by that, this pulpy, over-the-top gore fest seems to have committed to all the wrong choices thereby hampering its performers from being able to bring their best efforts to the screen; even Cage. It is not that McKay and the writing team do not have an affinity for the source material – an early scene done up in the style of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) proves that there is reverence here – but they get lost when translating the story to the present day. A period-set farce would have been a much stronger comedic approach that could still have explored many of the same beats that they wanted to with Renfield and also enjoyed the added benefit of the juxtaposition of a Victorian setting grappling with our modern sensibilities.