Review: Renfield Finds Comedy as Dracula’s Aide Struggles With Morality

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Universal Pictures

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is tired of being Dracula's (Nicolas Cage) servant in Renfield.

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) bursts into his neighbor’s unit, grabs an ant farm from a young boy and tips the contents — ants and sand alike — into his open mouth. As Dracula’s longtime familiar, Renfield derives power from eating insects, rather than human blood. “You’re not a good man,” the boy’s mother yells at him, disgust in her voice despite the comedy of the moment. The declaration calls back to an earlier scene, when Renfield moved into the ramshackle apartment complex and contributed an ant to the boy’s terrarium. Then, the mother praised him as a good man.

That question of whether the eponymous character is good or not is at the center of Renfield, the new 93-minute comedy by Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War, The Lego Movie). It preoccupies Renfield himself and also concerns his romantic interest and co-lead Rebecca — the tough-as-nails beat cop played by Awkwafina, who is frustrated by her low-level responsibility and carries a chip on her shoulder since her cop father’s untimely death.

But goodness or lack of it doesn’t worry the audience, or even the support group that provides the film’s framing. Rather, we just want to know: Is Renfield going to break free of Dracula?

As played by Hoult, our hero/antihero is Robert Montague Renfield, an English lawyer circa 1900 who was persuaded by Dracula (Nicolas Cage) to leave his wife and child in favor of a life he only dreamed of, but he ends up being the vampire’s Uber Eats-like corpse delivery guy. After some time, Renfield sours on the job (which makes sense because he doesn’t get much from it, aside from the ability to eat bugs and go nuclear) and, frankly, begins to feel like he might not be a good person. 

The film begins with Renfield attending a support group for codependent people. He’s seeking to find its members’ abusers to feed to his master — but Dracula demands innocent victims instead. Cowed, Renfield heads to a restaurant where he stumbles upon a hit on Rebecca and, impressed with her refusal to be afraid in the face of death, intercedes on her behalf.

The moment leads to the first of the wildly campy fight scenes that are the best part of Renfield. Any fight scene in any movie is obviously staged, but directors can choose to hide the strings. McKay takes the opposite tack with fights that are hilariously choreographed so that all the moving parts are visible, and you can tell that’s the point.

For example, in that first fight, at almost every other moment Renfield and Rebecca are slamming a fist or boot into a bad guy just in time to spin around and save the other with the follow-through energy of their motions. Or in the post-ant-consumption fight, Renfield separates a bad guy’s arms from his body and then throws the limbs across the apartment complex’s courtyard to take out two of Rebecca’s adversaries. If the activity had paused and the camera panned over the fighters frozen midair, Matrix-style, no one would have been surprised. But despite the powerful hits that explode body parts and enough gushing blood to make Tarantino shed a happy tear, the scenes are comedic rather than intense.

Dracula doesn’t make much of an appearance in such moments until the end of the film, which highlights something about Renfield that certain viewers will be unhappy about: This is not a Dracula movie, and this is not a Nic Cage movie. Though he is fun as Dracula, rolling his eyes and twitching his face in that overly dramatic Nic Cage way, he’s definitely a secondary character without all that much screen time. He’s good enough — and even delightful in moments where he capers and cackles and brings his psychic energy against Renfield. But he doesn’t steal the show. Some of the lesser characters, like Brandon Scott Jones as the support group leader and Ben Schwartz as the feeble criminal Redward Lobo, do as much with limited screen time and plenty of gags.

Awkwafina is convincing as Rebecca and seems to fully inhabit the character, only letting her trademark scratchy tirades sneak out occasionally, like when Rebecca shouts down her entire precinct and accuses them of being in the pocket of a gang. She’s a decent match with Hoult, who positively radiates frantic “who me, innocent me?” energy throughout the film, even as the body counts climb. Their chemistry is a bit off, but it’s good enough to keep watching.

The slight mismatch typifies Renfield. It’s a comedy, clearly. But it’s also a meet cute, a gang movie, a coming-of-age tale, a redemption story and a vampire flick. It satirizes the self-help language of support groups to questionable effect. It’s a lot for one movie, and it is a bit of a mess. By the end of the film, it’s surely clear to everyone that Renfield isn’t exactly good, but no one cares. The same can be said of Renfield — it’s not exactly a good film, but that doesn’t matter: It’s good enough for a few laughs.