Content Advisory: Excessive or gratuitous violence
The servant of Count Dracula fights for his independence in Renfield. For decades Robert Montagu Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) has been the familiar for Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage), with his primary task being locating victims for his master. Following Dracula’s latest defeat, Renfield relocates to an abandoned hospital in New Orleans. He nurses his master back to health between visits to a support group to deal with his co-dependency issues. Renfield soon finds himself caught in the middle of a war between police officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina) and local mob boss Bellafrancesca Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her son Teddy (Ben Schwartz).
Renfield Synopsis
Renfield is a horror-comedy directed by Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War), which acts as a modern-day continuation of sorts of Tod Browning’s original Universal Monsters Dracula, complete with an opening prologue that sees Nicolas Cage recreate some of Bela Lugosi’s iconic moments. The titular Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class), has spent decades as a semi-unwilling servant of Dracula, gaining superhuman powers by eating bugs and being healed by drinking Dracula’s blood. While attempting to acquire drug dealers as victims for his master, Renfield ends up crossing the path of Teddy Lobo, whose family gets free reign in the city thanks to the corrupt police force. The only exception is traffic cop Rebecca Quincy, who has been working with her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) to try and bring down the Lobos. However, Teddy ends up striking a deal with Dracula, which causes trouble for both Renfield and Rebecca.
My Thoughts on Renfield
Over the years, there have been many attempts to revive the Universal Monsters properties, including the interconnected Dark Universe, which immediately failed after the poor performance of the 2017 remake of The Mummy, as well as the one-off remake of The Invisible Man. Renfield is another one-off attempt which takes a very comedic approach to focus on Count Dracula’s long-suffering servant Robert Montagu Renfield.
The most positive takeaway from the film is the scenery-chewing dedication Nicolas Cage gives to his performance as Dracula. Despite technically being the film’s main antagonist, Cage’s Dracula spends most of the first half of the film recovering from being burnt to a crisp in the opening scene. This results in more focus on mob boss Bellafrancesca Lobo and her incredibly annoying son Teddy.
This whole mob boss subplot is quite obviously plot filler, and both Lobos end up being incredibly unnecessary and grating characters. Despite having since found success as the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ben Schwartz‘s performance as Teddy Lobo hearkens back to when he was best known as Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation, and not in a good way. Despite these flaws, Renfield still has fun moments, particularly as the titular character uses his bug-drawn superpowers to dispatch thugs in an incredibly gory fashion.
Ultimately, if it weren’t for the involvement of Nicolas Cage, Renfield would probably end up being a more forgettable film than it ends up being. While the movie won’t do much regarding revitalizing the Universal Monsters, the film is still a relatively entertaining horror-comedy that makes for a fun distraction.
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