The newest flick to star the blood-sucking Count, directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman, delegates the notorious vamp to a supporting role. Focusing instead on his unhappy manservant, Robert Montague Renfield, this comedic take on Bram Stoker's immortal characters blends horror, comedy, gothic, gangster, cop, and action movies into one gooey, gory mix.
Opening with a truncated backstory of Dracula (Nicholas Cage) and Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), filmed in old-timey black and white (fun touch, in my opinion), the story quickly focuses in on Renfield in present-day New Orleans attending a support group for victims of narcissistic abuse. He and Drac have fallen on hard times financially and he is tasked with finding innocent humans to bring back to their digs (an abandoned hospital, naturally) for Dracula's dinner. The innocent part of this is especially important as Dracula has been reduced to a bloody, oozing pulp with fangs—so many fangs—and needs the blood of innocents to build up his strength.
Renfield, however, has begun to resent his life of skullduggery, wishing to stand up to his evil overlord but feeling completely powerless. His tiny act of rebellion is to attend this group therapy and hunt down the narcissists who abuse his new friends. This seems to work for a little while but after a hunting session gone wrong, Renfield is at odds with both Dracula and Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), a flashy mafioso-in-training.
Enter Rebecca (Awkwafina), a beat cop with a stubborn sense of justice that keeps her from being corrupted by the Lobos mafia, much to the chagrin of literally every other cop in her department. Renfield witnesses Rebecca stand up to Teddy and, after helping her brutally take out a restaurant full of armed mobsters, is completely inspired to be the hero she thinks he is. In an attempt to turn over a new leaf, Renfield realizes (with the help of group therapy leader Mark played by Brandon Scott Jones) that if he stops doing his job and enabling Dracula's misdeeds, the famed vampire "will never come to full power." So, Renfield calls it quits. He gets a studio apartment, slathers it in paint and inspirational posters, dresses in a pastel color block sweater, and tries to go about his life.
Unfortunately for him, Dracula (whose strength and resemblance to human form grows with each passing scene) shows up at the next group meeting and Mark unknowingly invites him in. Slaughter ensues and Rebecca finds Renfield in the middle of a massacre. The mafia shows up wanting retribution for the bloodbath in the restaurant and Rebecca and Renfield go on the run, with the mafia and the corrupt police hot on their heels. Dracula makes a deal with Teddy and his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo), they steal Rebecca's FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) as bait, and the final battle takes place in the Lobos crime mansion.
Rebecca and Renfield, having saved all the innocents with Dracula's life-saving blood, are free to ride off into the sunset. Or, you know, attend more group meetings where Renfield can acknowledge that he is, in fact, a co-dependant.
The genre-bending nature of this film ultimately produces a comedy with so much gore it borders on campy. The head-exploding, arm-ripping feats of the undead are so over the top that no tension ever actually is built because everything is just ridiculous. I haven't seen this many bodies explode since the bombastic finale to 2019's Ready or Not. Renfield's body count, however, is much higher, further pushing this movie out of the realm of pure horror.
I'd heard some friends say that this movie was actually two movies happening concurrently onscreen, and I have to disagree somewhat with that. I think that for all the flaws in the script, it does at least overlap the crime boss/cop movie pretty well with the antihero/gothic film. Teddy meets Renfield and then runs into Rebecca who wants to nail him because his family is responsible for the death of her father, another cop, and then because of the manhunt for Renfield, Teddy encounters Dracula. It's woven tightly enough that it didn't feel episodic to me.
That said, there were some pretty frustrating issues with the script. Rebecca and her sister are glaringly lacking in character. Their only deal is that their dad was killed and Rebecca hasn't been able to handle the injustice of it as well as her sister, so she's stuck doing DUI stops while the sister is a successful FBI agent. There's nothing else to Rebecca except a stubborn demand for justice and a burgeoning attraction to Renfield (which is never really continued in the second half of the movie...?). Yet while they've been given so little to work with in terms of character, they are forced to over-iterate their motivations in their dialogue. I think the failure here is an insistence on telling, while also showing.
Our introduction to Rebecca includes the Police Sargeant clunkily telling her her own backstory, which is then reiterated mere moments later by her sister Kate. Meanwhile, we see the two sisters fighting, one dressed as a svelte FBI agent and the other dressed in the bulky uniform of a beat cop, and then we zoom into the poster commemorating their father's end of watch. It's just too much. And it continues to be overexplained throughout the film.
The script is at its best during the quippy moments, finding its footing in Hoult's Hugh Grant-like deadpan. It stumbles in defining its moral code, failing to adequately address the decades of serial killing committed by Renfield. Instead, it seemingly allows for a future of some kind between Renfield and the righteous Rebecca without any inquiry as to how he will atone or how she can overcome her fierce moral compass. Is slaying Dracula enough to clean Renfield's bloodstained hands?
Other unanswered questions linger, such as how Renfield's existence works in a world without Dracula. Has his body simply been in stasis through vampire powers? Is he now free to age? Will he seek out his long-lost daughter or descendants? Why didn't he perish alongside Dracula?
The world will never know.
One final word on the script: The tradition of genre horror as a medium in which to artistically portray fears of society's psyche gets a facelift through the lens of narcissistic, abusive relationships. It's no surprise, given the growing awareness of relationship violence and abuse and rise in "psychobabble" on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. I appreciated the reimagining of Dracula as some deranged narcissistic boss, exploring our collective anxieties about dealing with abusers.
The relationship between Dracula and Renfield draws the viewer closer into the manipulation with each scene shared between the two. At the start, the duo appears to be a regurgitation of Voldemort and Wormtail from the Harry Potter series. The intricacies of that particular partnership never progress past weak-willed, scared-shitless servant and commanding-with-the-promise-of-renewed-power villain. But Renfield dives deeper, showing the manipulation and word-twisting present in abusive relationships. At one point, Dracula even succeeds in convincing Renfield that it is Renfiend himself who holds all the power in their situation. Later in the film when explaining how he got tangled with the undead Prince of Darkness in the first place, Renfield says to Rebecca, "That's his greatest power: he looks into your eyes and sees what you think you need to make your life whole."
It's an excellent assessment of abusive, narcissistic personalities and an easy way to analyze the phenomena in an easily digestible way. Yet, again, this movie lacks all subtlety and while the storytelling convention of the support group is funny and entertaining, it really smacks you over the head many, many times over. I would appreciate a quieter, more thoughtful use of the movie to explore this topic more than the oft-stated announcement of what the film is doing. Additionally, the question of how complicit is Renfield in these atrocities given his victim status is hardly explored and certainly never answered, even when that would have forgiven some of the lack of subtlety in other parts of the abuse/narcissism conversation by complicating the topic's portrayal.
Still, Nicholas Cage is enthralling as Dracula. He oozes (literally) unhinged depravity in one scene and Old World charm in the next. His performance is a scene-stealer that gives Nicholas Hoult a run for his money. Hoult, further carving out a niche in playing pathetic characters, is undoubtedly quite good. With a paleness the directors of The Twilight Saga would salivate over, he is able to exude sniveling underling, capable henchman, and haunted antihero seamlessly.
Awkwafina does the best with what she's been given in terms of emotional depth. I think she can play sincere very well, but sometimes delivers lines—especially those containing the word "bitch"—with the same inflection and cadence that feels copy/pasted out of her previous performances. She did what I was actually afraid Nicholas Cage would do, which is turn the character of Rebecca into some iteration of Awkwafina instead of the other way around. Ben Schwartz played edgy better than I would have initially expected, although the flamboyance of (I'm not even kidding) Tedward Lobo is so over the top that you can't help but be reminded of Schwartz's Parks & Rec character, Jean-Ralphio. The main standout in the ensemble is Brandon Scott Jones's portrayal of support group leader Mark. Offering a different kind of pathetic to Hoult's Renfield, Jones is what convinces the audience that the support group Greek Chorus is a loveable group of misfits that actually cares about the wellbeing of Renfield.
The production value of the sets and costumes is well done, creating lush, slightly whimsical (although sometimes grimy) backdrops for the New Orleans underbelly, reminiscent of Zombie Island in 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo. The vibe of the movie is captured in its atmosphere and isn't tinted so dark that you can't see the action. It's easy to envision a future where Renfield is popularly added to cable programming for 13 Nights of Halloween, and the performances of both Cage and Hoult might grow a larger fan base over time. Overall, I think this film succeeds with the mindset that not every movie needs to be Oscar bait or lead into a mega-popular series.
Overall
3 stars out of 5.
End Credits: 4/5
These end credits continued the vibe of the movie with footage of actors and close-up stock imagery of blood in a microscope. There was clearly an effort put in to make the credits cohesive to the film and to keep them engaging the whole way through.
Soundtrack: 3/5
Score by Marco Beltrami. The score was like a funky Halloween vibes CD, blending conventional horror sounds with electric organs. The track "Renfield and Rebecca Kick Ass" has a little Home Depot commercial quality to it before opening up into a particularly fun guitar solo number. Beyond the score, the movie features songs by Lizzo, YUNGBLUD, My Chemical Romance, JDVisionquest3000, and David Wilkins. The variety in genre works well in such a genre-blended movie, and there aren't so many featured songs that these lose their impact. Because the inclusion of familiar songs is so infrequent, they really stand out and add punch to each scene.
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