Renfield, the latest from Adult Swim veteran Chris McKay, is a curious combination: a film that little from its audience and insists upon itself far, far too much. It seems to respond to the (thankfully brief) trend of accusing indie horror from the mid-2010s and onward of being “elevated.” Jump scares and gore were out, while “thought scares” and allegory were in. While it should be a given that a film can have both thrills and metaphors at once, McKay and screenwriter Ryan Ridley are hard-bent on proving it.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation, R. M. Renfield is a patient of the psychiatrist Dr. Seward with an obsessive devotion to Count Dracula. In the novel, he hesitates to harm Mina Harker and attempts to resist the Count, but Dracula’s gaze alone overpowers his conscience. Renfield expands on this as it attempts to tell a story about being a vampire’s familiar as a metaphor for real-life codependence. Maybe I’m stretching the definition of “metaphor” here, seeing as the film shows its hand early by opening at a support group meeting for codependents.
The scene begins somberly as a woman recounts her boyfriend’s history of abuse — though, as it turns out, this film is not a patient one. The monologue is cut off by Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who remarks on how seen he feels before summarizing his history with the Count over narration. With Count Dracula (Nicholas Cage) trapped by a priest and a vampire hunter, Renfield has a chance to be free of his master, but one look keeps the cycle going. When the priest explodes and the hunter bursts into flame while jumping out the window, Renfield informs us that he “didn’t expect that.” The statement is really a question to the audience: did you, dear viewer, expect that we could be both serious and ridiculous? You’ll be left wondering if they succeeded in either.
Cage, decked with dentures and lengthy press-ons, moves past the obvious homoerotic angle by affecting a maternal sing-song. If you’re watching Renfield for anything, it’s him. In a film that constantly undercuts its absurdity, he brings it back over the top. He croons over world domination and shrieks about “gun… WIELDING criminals.” While the stereotypical Cage performance culminates in letting loose, he simmers in calculated deceit as Dracula.
Little else in Renfield feels premeditated. Based on a pitch by indie comics legend Robert Kirkman, it’s hard not to wonder if Universal rushed to ninety pages from a napkin as part of its series of attempts to make a bankable franchise off of its horror stable. Now, nobody remembers the Dark Universe in the first place, and this more than likely includes those working at Universal itself.
Whatever his motivation, Ridley seems to have been grasping at straws while trying to move things forward. Making routine stops along the way is a cookie-cutter law enforcement B plot. In fact, the plot begins to feel like set decoration for a film not adapted from Stoker, but a Blue Bloods season recap, following Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a New Orleans police officer and eventual love interest for Renfield. Rebecca is stuck as a traffic cop but has ambitions to take down the Lobos, the city’s foremost crime family and the ones who killed her father. She wants to avenge him, as a lone wolf if necessary, while her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) prefers to play the long game. The Lobos have the police in their pocket, which under Renfield’s central metaphor, makes the police out to be a fundamentally good organization trapped in an abusive relationship.
After Renfield takes out a Lobo contingent almost single-handedly, Rebecca remarks on how the city desperately needs heroes like him. This point is belaboured throughout the film, and to what end? We might have fun watching Hoult eat bugs and slaughter a biker gang, but making it out as anything more than pure indulgence is cloying at best. At worst, any point about standing one’s ground or being a hero becomes genuinely dangerous when applied to law enforcement. Of course, none of Renfield’s politics are intentional: this should not make the bottom-of-the-barrel story beats above question.
It could all be ignored even if Rebecca exposits her motivation for the dozenth time. Aesthetic sensibility, or pure “vibes,” can easily make the plot a non-issue. At least from a marketing standpoint, this is Renfield’s ambition. The cop plot is entirely absent from the film’s trailers. It does deliver buckets upon buckets of gore, along with some pretty colours that aren’t red. Lip service paid to expressionism is appreciated. What it continues to lack is cohesion. These scenes are divided from a seemingly inordinate amount of coverage and rendered as pastel sludge. What’s the point of Renfield backflipping from a prone position onto an assailant’s back to tear his arms off when it feels so weightless?
The issue of illegibility isn’t just skin deep. Our emotional investment in Renfield relies on the belief that our hero is overcoming increasingly overwhelming odds and that he and Rebecca are growing together through violence. Yet the editing is too hurried to maintain a sense of blocking or tension, nor is it rhythmic enough to keep us hypnotized.
While it may be distilled from a familiar formula that won’t make a familiar out of anyone, it’s hard to hate Renfield. There’s a sense of pluck mostly driven by Hoult’s unassuming performance. Despite that early “well that just happened”-esque line, the rest of his material emphasizes a straight man out of time — far from Stoker’s lunatic, he’s stuck in an irrational world of cop-talk and therapy-speak. Another standout has to be the purring Lobo matriarch Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who tragically shares sparing minutes of screentime with Cage.
As an aside, I can’t be the only one shocked the Lobos aren’t a werewolf gang. The first member introduced is a clearly-not-Latino Ben Schwartz, which doesn’t help clarify things. As a B plot symptom, Schwartz adds little to the film. Although, one of Renfield’s few truly great moments comes when Rebecca lobs a brick of cocaine at the back of his head. Moments like these demonstrate that the film could have been something if it divested itself of its need to say something important.
