Renfield Is A Mid-Tier Bloody Mess Lifted Slightly By Cage And Hoult

It’s no secret that I really enjoy Universal Monsters movies. The idea of a relationship comedy between Dracula and Renfield definitely tickled my funny bone somewhat and I had moderately high hopes for Renfield. 

Right off the bat we were greeted with narration which made me slightly nervous — this is a 90-minute comedy so a three-minute block of narration is a noticeable chunk of time. I was charmed by the black and white sequences fitting Nicholas Cage and Nicholas Hoult into the 1931 Dracula film. Cage cuts an imposing figure as Dracula and he often looks Lugosi-esque. His costumes are creative and beautiful and really lean into classical Dracula in technicolor (mostly reds, obviously). Hoult on the other hand is quiet and rumpled, and fits in this film like he was born there. 

Both of these performances seem to belong to a possibly better movie. 

This movie is 93 minutes long and I felt that it was dragging big time. It’s distracted — Awkwafina stars as a cop who is tired of being on the DUI beat and is dying for her big case break. Due to a series of odd events, she ends up on the trail of the same crime family that murdered her father. The crime family attempts to retaliate against her.

Did you notice Dracula or Renfield doesn’t really factor into this description? That’s because, weirdly, it’s not really about them. The movie desperately tries to talk you into thinking it is but it’s not. It’s about these characters we don’t know. With thirty minutes left I wrote “If this doesn’t do anything interesting in the last third this is a 2.5-star movie” I regret to inform you it didn’t. 

While there were some comedic lines, they were mostly funny because they sound like they were delivered by aliens. I think they tried to make What We Do in The Shadows while trying to cement Dracula as “the” vampire but then it got board-roomed to death. I think it has just about zero rewatchability. It’s not melodramatic enough to be campy and fun, it’s not serious enough to be scary, it just ends up being a baffling gory mess. 

The third or so of the movie that is actually about Renfield and Dracula is good. The support group scenes are interesting and funny. It just can’t carry the rest of it. 

It is also alarmingly mismarketed. Even with the Red Band trailer they really undersold how much of this movie is pure violence. It felt like about half was pretty hardcore violence and fighting. That’s not really something I feel strongly associated with Dracula, but whatever. I feel a little bad for how many people are probably going to see this and be surprised by this fact. 

I give the Nicholas Hoult Renfield (Universal Pictures; R; 1hr 33mins) a 2.5 out of 5.