Dracula might be the most malleable character in horror. Not only does he speak, contrary to most monsters, there is panache and personality to his nature. Sure, his primary goal is to drain a meatsack of its blood, but there is a little foreplay before all that. Renfield, the new horror comedy directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley, purports to turn Dracula’s panache on its head. In this telling, Dracula is a toxic narcissist who drinks blood for immortality, not a suave aristocrat who drinks blood for immortality. It follows that his greatest adversary is someone who sees through his manipulation, not a vampire hunter who uses sunlight, crosses, and the like. Yet McKay’s subversion is barely clever enough to sustain a comedy sketch, let alone a feature film, so he pads out the premise with repetitive ultraviolence.
Nicolas Cage plays Dracula, and his mannered performance is an extension of Bela Legosi’s influential interpretation of the character (flashback scenes recreate the 1931 classic, with Cage digitally inserted). Dracula’s longtime familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) provides breathless voice over, explaining the particulars of vampiric servitude. There are a few details that Renfield glosses over, and the film by extension, like how he also remains immortal and how eating bugs gives him superhuman strength. Ridley wants us to accept these details are not important, and yet they prove crucial to the plot. Set in the present, Dracula and Renfield find themselves in New Orleans, where Renfield seeks support for his codependent relationship and a deadly crime wave might rip the city apart. These parallel plots converge, with Dracula teaming up with a crime lord (Shohreh Aghdashloo) to take over the world.
Unless, of course, Renfield can get over his horrible boss. McKay and Ridley milk the familiar/vampire relationship with a handful of support group scenes, wherein Renfield uses the trapping of anonymous discussion to relate to others. The support group dialogue can be funny, as those characters have real problems and fixate on strange non-sequiturs (there is an entire discussion about how ska music is awful). Ridley has a host of sitcom credits to his name, including Community and Rick and Morty, which suggest he knows how to frame a comic situation and build off-kilter personalities around it, and indeed Renfield might work better as a straight horror comedy, rather than a horror comedy that gets bored with itself.
Other scenes do not share the support group’s semblance of reality, which means there are way more tedious moments where Renfield fights bad guys, either on Dracula’s behalf or to protect a cop (Awkwafina) who takes pity on him. McKay, who directed The Tomorrow War and The LEGO Batman Movie, does not have a gift for action. He uses quick cuts to hide his shoddy choreography, trusting that stylized gore can substitute for it. There are some Grand Guignol flourishes, like when Renfield severs someone’s arms then uses them as weapons, except they happen with such frenzied, borderline incoherent intensity that there is no time to consider that the material is meant to be transgressive.
To watch Renfield is to get the impression that someone made a successful elevator pitch, then panicked. Ridley hastily constructed several scenes, so that the basic plot details do not withstand such scrutiny. Remember how the film begins with flashbacks to the original Dracula? Well, midway through the film Ridley decides that the non-supernatural characters are already familiar with the famous vampire, an attempt at self-awareness that only grows more confusing the more you think about it. Such concerns are barely the point in a film like this, a decidedly unambitious genre hybrid where audiences are meant to have fun. It is difficult to “turn off your brain,” though, when a film is so tedious that letting your mind wander is more fun than what transpires on the screen.
That tedium is so pervasive that it even extends to Cage’s performance. It may be a comic extension of Legosi’s, and while he bites through the scenery, McKay lacks the courage to lean into the actor’s penchant for mania. We know from Mandy and Mom and Dad that modern Cage has no problem with over-the-top genre violence. But he needs a confident filmmaker to “unleash the Cage,” as it were, and McKay does the unthinkable: he makes Cage kind of forgettable.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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