Official trailer
The idea is great, and for stretches the workplace self-help comedy works beautifully, with Dracula as the ultimate manipulative partner and Renfield as the servant trying to get out from under him.
Then it remembers it’s also an action movie and a crime film, piles on subplots it doesn’t need, and dilutes its own best joke. Cage is worth the price of admission. The film he’s in is merely okay. I’m torn on this one. I had a blast whenever Cage was on screen and drifted whenever he wasn’t, and a movie whose action scenes are its dull stretches has a real problem. This is a flawed, overstuffed, frequently entertaining film that contains a much sharper one. Whenever it focuses on the central relationship and lets Cage cut loose, it sings. Whenever it wanders into its generic crime plot, it sags. The result is uneven, salvaged by its lead.
Nicolas Cage as Dracula
Nicolas Cage plays Dracula, and it’s exactly the gift you’d hope. Cage has spent a career perfecting a particular brand of committed excess, and the role of the most theatrical villain in literature lets him deploy all of it. His Dracula is monstrous, vain, petulant, and grandiose, a melodramatic narcissist who treats his familiar like a disposable assistant and throws tantrums worthy of the worst boss imaginable. Cage clearly relishes every moment, and his commitment to the role’s theatricality is the film’s greatest pleasure.
What makes the performance more than ham is that Cage finds the real menace beneath the camp. His Dracula is funny, but he’s also frightening, a predator whose charm is a tool of control, and the abusive-partner conceit works because Cage plays both the seduction and the cruelty underneath it. I’d happily watch a whole film of nothing but this Dracula bullying his assistant.
The Self-Help Conceit
The film’s smartest idea is its framing. Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult, attends a support group for people in codependent relationships and slowly realizes that his centuries of servitude to Dracula are the ultimate toxic dynamic. That’s a terrific joke. It takes the vocabulary of therapy and points it at a literal master and familiar, and treating Renfield’s escape as a lesson in healthy boundaries is the funniest thing the film does.
Hoult is good as Renfield, playing him as a sweet, beaten-down man slowly finding the courage to leave, and the central relationship has real comic and even emotional truth. When the film stays focused on Renfield’s struggle to break free of Dracula, using the self-help structure to illuminate the dynamic, it’s fresh and funny and even pointed. This material is the film’s reason to exist, and it’s strong enough that a tighter movie built entirely around it could have been excellent.
The Overstuffed Plot
The film’s fatal weakness is that it doesn’t trust its own best material. Around the central relationship it builds an entirely unnecessary crime plot, with a drug-dealing crime family, a corrupt city and a tough cop played by Awkwafina, and I resent almost every minute of it. I’d have cut the gangsters entirely and handed their screen time back to Hoult and Cage, since the Renfield and Dracula dynamic is the only reason to watch.
This bloat is the film’s undoing. The self-help comedy about escaping Dracula is a complete and satisfying idea on its own, but the film buries it under action sequences, crime-movie clichés, and tonal whiplash, as though it didn’t believe its premise could carry a movie. The hyper-violent action, while gory and occasionally fun, feels imported from a different film, and the crime plot is a generic time-filler. The result is a movie constantly distracting itself from its own strengths, and it pays for that lack of confidence.
Is Renfield worth watching?
Renfield deserves its 6 on a gloriously committed Nicolas Cage performance as Dracula and a sharp central premise of vampire servitude as a toxic codependent relationship. Cage is both hilarious and menacing, Nicholas Hoult is a sweet and effective Renfield, and the self-help framing finds real comedy and truth. It loses points for an overstuffed, unnecessary crime plot, imported action sequences, and a fundamental lack of confidence in its own best material.
It’s a 6 because I had a great time with half a movie and sat through the other half. Cage and the self-help conceit are worth seeing, and the film around them keeps getting in the way. That frustrates me more than an outright bad movie would, because the better version keeps flickering on the screen and then getting shoved aside for another shootout.
