Having grown sick and tired of his centuries as Dracula's lackey, Renfield finds a new lease on life — and maybe even redemption — when he falls for feisty, perennially angry traffic cop Rebecc...
Add a cup of gooey grotesquerie, a tablespoon of patchy flair and campy gore, a dash of sloppy dull fangs, and in the end, “Renfield” merely avoids being a recipe for disaster….but it is no four-course meal. Not at all what I had hoped.
What I enjoy the most about Chris McKay’s direction here is the atmosphere he helps create through each scene. When he struggles to find stability in the unfortunate scattershot journey ahead, the mood that he establishes almost makes up for it. He has flashes of the same creativity and intentions that made The Lego Movies so beloved but everything else feels just out of place enough to give off that impression of imbalance.
Elsewhere, the Cinematography and editing, I thought, was fairly decent throughout, there was a few decent monologues and dialogue exchanges and while I felt they could’ve gone further with the production design, I felt they did fine. The music at its disposal is pretty generic even if it’s implemented in the best manner it can be done and the same can be done for the CGI. As excessive as it is, the effects are, at least, bountiful and fairly impressive, pairing well with the makeup and the action is solid, complimented by a surprisingly healthy dose of graphic gore and fight choreography that’s well-lit, coherent and somewhat creative.
And of course, there’s Nic FREAKIN’ Cage having a crackling good time as the Lord of Death. His own take of the iconic vampire is intermittently both delightful and deranged at once, constantly making the best out of unfortunate limited screentime. Nicholas Hoult makes for a solid lead, balancing the protagonists turmoil with great physical comedy, Awkwafina makes the most out of a deeply surface-level character and the rest of the cast work off each other pretty well.
For a good half of the film, it presents itself as exactly as it promises: a hyper violent bloody dark comedy with the relationship with Renfield and Dracula being at the forefront. There’s a somewhat flimsy but equally satisfying allegory regarding toxic relationships and regaining your own independence that the film dives into earnestly; diving into Dracula’s while also taking the sincere root of Renfields journey seriously. It’s nothing more than mediocre at the end of the day but it’s one of the precious few moments of the film where it comes back into focus……because everything else that makes the story, while far from bad, is incredibly hectic and rough around the edges.
Genre comedies can sometimes end up coming across like a live action version of cartoon, which isn't always a bad thing. Yet the end result here is one that doesn’t get much laughs. Dramatic beats feel aloof and detached, most of the dialogue is noticeably re-recorded with ADR, it doesn’t fair well as a comedy or thriller and every character, outside of the main trio, had one distinct personality trait and nothing else.
Yes, the subplot involving Awkwafina's honest cop seeking revenge is barely serviceable but that’s indicative of the main thing holding this film back: an identity. Barely any of the main acts get explored and what occurs for the rest of the runtime doesn’t do much to break the cliched confines of this vanilla cage. Hell, the short runtime actually works against what the rest of the film tries to work towards because of how quickly it zooms past any potential semblance of character development, conflict or world-building of any kind. The few attempts at those that are made range between passable to staggeringly substandard; never mind the fact that the film tries to be so many genres at once and only succeeds at being half of them. Even the central theme, the central message of the movie is executed in a broad, childlike manner that could’ve easily removed whatever emotional residue stuck.
It’s only mildly frustrating.
When things go to plan, which is about 50% of the time, Renfield is a blatant love letter to Dracula and the well-wrought absurdity we came to expect out of that lore. But when things don’t click or go slightly awry, it becomes a fusion of confusion with a few confounding things, never quite managing to unify its sub-genres together to create something that……flows naturally.
