RENFIELD [2023]

Renfield (2023)
Directed by: Chris McKay
Written by: Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ridley
Starring: Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage

USA

IN CINEMAS NOW

RUNNING TIME: 95 mins

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

R. N. Renfield was once an English lawyer turned by Count Dracula into his slave. For many decades he served his master well,  maintaining the superhuman strength and agelessness Dracula gave him by regularly eating bugs. Now, Dracula is badly injured by some vampire hunters, and the duo moves to New Orleans to recuperate. There, Renfield discovers a self-help group for persons in co-dependent relationships, and plans to hunt down the group’s abusive partners so Dracula can eat without Renfield feeling remorse. However, he starts realising that he himself could be in a similar situation. Meanwhile police officer Rebecca Quincy is out to avenge her father’s death. She arrests Teddy Lobo, a gang leader who hired an assassin to kill some hoods Renfield was confronting while going after his latest target, but Teddy is released from custody by corrupt police officers….

Several times when watching one of the countless [sorry] adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or indeed the book itself, it did come to my mind that a version of the tale focusing on the Count’s “familiar” could be worthwhile. After all, he’s not someone we really know that well, though the 1927 play and 1931 movie version expanded the character a bit so that, instead of Jonathan Harker being the lawyer who visits Dracula’s Translyvanian castlle because the Count wanting to buy a property, and being imprisoned by him until he finally escaped, it was Renfield, who’s turned by Dracula into his slave and comes with him to England. Even though this reduces the role of Harker in the story, it’s a modification which does work. It’s this version of the character which is featured in Universal’s latest attempt at continuing its Dark Universe, a film which is basically a direct sequel to the 1931 film, though, coming especially after The Invisible Man which suggested that, actually, Universal may finally know what they’re doing with this franchise which brings back their iconic monsters, after several stumbles which also showed that the paying public aren’t particularly interested anyway, it’s a sequel many will probably like to pretend doesn’t exist after seeing it. Renfield is a wretched, dreary, muddled mess of a film which totally wastes its central premise of Renfield trying to get out of what is basically a toxic relationship with his master, settling for an extremely awkward mixture of mild humour that sometimes verges on becoming actual satire but which falls flat – honestly, if you’ve seen the trailer then that’s about as funny as it gets, which  isn’t particularly funny at all – and boring fight scenes with lots of digital blood which sometimes magically disappears from walls and floors post-eruption. The thing also looks extremely truncated, with a middle act that appears to be mostly missing, yet this is yet another film where much of the dialogue the characters spout is exposition, characters explaining what’s happening or their motives. And Nicolas Cage, sad to say, isn’t even in it much.

Renfield’s narration gives us the background and indeed will become a major feature throughout. As he tells us that, in the early 20th century, Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula meets English lawyer R. M. Renfield and makes him his slave, we see footage from the 1931 film, with Cage replacing Bela Lugosi and Nicholas Hoult replacing Dwright Frye as Renfield. Helped immensely by Cage wearing makeup that makes him look like Lugosi, it’s seamlessly done. Dracula kills Renfield for betraying him and is himself by Van Helsing, but then he comes back to life and brings Renfield back from the grave too. Ninety years later, Dracula has a close call with some vampire hunters who almost kill him with sunlight, though it’s not very easy to follow the action, with flash cuts and a wobbly camera, which doesn’t bode well for later mayhem. The duo moves to New Orleans to recuperate, and we don’t see Dracula for some time now as Renfield comes to the fore. Even when we do revisit Dracula, he’s badly damaged and not very active. Renfield discovers this self-help group and is easily accepted except for one girl who’s story is twice interrupted by Renfield when he suddenly shows up and needs to let it all out. This is supposed to be funny, by the way. On following the abusive husband of one of the women in the group to a warehouse with stolen drugs, Renfield is confronted by several criminals before they’re all attacked by an assassin hired by the rival Lobo crime family. Renfield kills him, but his hirer Teddy drives off in a hurry. A weakened Renfield drags the corpses back to Dracula’s lair in the basement of a dilapidated hospital, while Teddy runs into a sobriety checkpoint ran by Rebecca Quincy, who arrests Teddy after he hurls bricks of cocaine at her. Unfortunately, most of the force is corrupt and releases him. No,we don’t get a suspicion that all these cops are not good, with growing suspense eventually followed by a dramatic reveal. We’re just bluntly told this and that’s it.

Dracula tells Renfield that the criminals he’s brought as food are insufficient, and that he desires the blood of someone pure and innocent instead, so Renfield goes to a restaurant to abduct commoners while Rebecca is also led there by clues from the crime scene, but the two are caught in an attack on Rebecca’s life that Teddy has been pressured into making so that the fierce reputation of the Lobos will be reestablished. And so we get the first of several unexciting fight sequences where the two battle assailants with lots of leaping about and CG gore, Renfield basically being a superhero, if not one who’s really on the side of good yet. Yes, Universal are still obviously interested in going down this route with these films, despite The Invisible Man promisingly suggesting otherwise. Yawn! Teddy’s mother, Bellafrancesca, orders Renfield to hunt down the man who killed her footsoldiers, but what about Dracula? Well, he actually has his sights set on world domination. This isn’t the first time he’s been keen on doing this, but it tells us again that the producers were more interested in Marvel than Stoker. Renfield fiinally takes to heart the teachings of his self-help group and decides to make a life for himself apart from his master, but here’s the thing – there’s virtually no sense of a transition. It’s very sudden. In fact is seems as a lot of footage which showed Renfield changing his mind has been removed, which may keep the fast pace going but which hampers audience involvement in his situation. If footage wasn’t cut, then this just indicates terrible script writing by Ryan Ridley, working from an outline by Robert Kirkman, in his first film script after doing lots  of TV. At least there’s one event soon after which is genuinely startling, we’re really surprised that the movie has taken this turn – but then it ruins it at the end.

While he doesn’t eat a live cockroach on screen as he did in Vampire’s Kiss way back in 1988, Cage certainly eats up the role, which, seeing as he’s said he’s wanted to pay Dracula for ages, makes it surprising that he’s so underused, not even being given much to do for many of the scenes in which he actually is present. He tries to be frightening first and foremost, with none of the sexual aspect of most Draculas, but he’s also an actor who sometimes looks like he’s reading off cue cards, and he does so here. Maybe that’s what he was indeed doing though I doubt it, but he shouldn’t make it so obvious. Nonetheless his take on the character is still interesting and one that fans will enjoy seeing. As well as wearing clever makeup which almost turns him into Lugosi, he sometimes has a strip of lighting across his eyes just like in the 1931 film. Hoult is just unable to command the screen the way a lead actor should, and irritatingly seems to be channeling Hugh Grant when he was in his tiresome rom-com years. There are times when he does project the vulnerability his character requires though, which makes one wish that he’d been allowed to project more of it and not be required to act so flippant, and that he’d been allowed to show a natural transformation. And unfortunately he has zero chemistry with Awkwafina as Rebecca, though then again it’s possibly more the script which made me confused as to whether the two characters fancy each other or not. I eventually came to the conclusion that they do, and that this is another film of today which seems scared of showing romantic or sexual interaction – I may sound as if I’m going over the top here but have a think and you might see what I mean. It’s very odd and rather worrying. The usually funny Awkwafina is required to mostly shout her lines and act like the “straight man” to Hoult, and therefore soon gets annoying, while her scenes with Camille Chan as her sister Kate come across as being strangely unnatural. Shohreh Aghdashloo gets a grand entrance as crime matriarch Bellafrancesca but never features as as much as it seems like she will.

Awkward transitions from one scene to another, and scenes which seem to cut out before they’ve lasted their natural duration, are everywhere. .Did they rip apart previous cuts and put them back together in different ways multiple times until they got to this version of it? Dialogue often seems added in after the fact. There is indeed a hell of a lot of graphic gore, with Renfield tearing off arms, scraping away faces, and punching heads off, though its highly unconvincing nature just makes it look like we’re watching a computer game. At least some genuine and very good stunt work seems to be in evidence, despite the whirling camera and the frantic editing sometimes making it hard to discern what’s actually taking place. Perhaps the highlight is when Renfield rips off two severed arms, then fights with them, using them like real weapons, even twirling them. The scene is more amusing than the socio-psycho-babble stuff, where Ridley is afraid to run with the idea and holds back considerably, perhaps worrying about offending some people or some viewers finding it too heavy, both of which are ridiculous, but that’s the climate that we live in. At times there seems to be some attempt to emulate What We Do in the Shadows, but it’s halfhearted, displaying little understanding of how and why both the film and series worked, while director Chris McKay just doesn’t seem able to embue the material with any passion, nor balance its light and dark elements well.

At times, and especially at the end, Renfield wants to be inspirational to those in toxic relationships, but, in its released form at least, it doesn’t seem interested enough in its own toxic relationship. It doesn’t focus nearly as much as it should do on the dynamic between Renfield and Dracula, and in particular Renfield becoming empowered, meaning that it fails in its chief aim. It fails largely as a film too. Still, I’m sure that, several times when watching one of the countless [sorry] adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or indeed the book itself, it will still come to my mind that a version of the tale focusing on the Count’s “familiar” could be worthwhile.

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