Renfield

Renfield, as the enslaved aide to his narcissistic boss, Dracula, is forced to procure his master's prey, and to do his every bidding. However, after centuries of servitude, he's ready to see if there's a life outside of the shadow cast by the Prince of Darkness.

R. M. Renfield is a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He’s the vampire’s deranged and devoted familiar, helping to turn Mina Harker (best played by Winona Ryder) into a vampire, all in return for the promise of immortality.

He’s probably most famous for eating bugs.

This is what inspired the name of the medical diagnosis for “Renfield Syndrome” where a person exhibits zoophagia—a compulsion to eat insects or live animals, or drink their blood, which eventually culminates in the urge to drink a person's blood, an act described as True-Vampirism, which often includes intentionally harming the person whose blood is being ingested.

Renfield the movie is a riff on that familiar idea popularized by things like Grosse Pointe Blank, or Sopranos, et al., where there’s a character experiencing a bit of a mental health crisis due to the intense pressures of their job, and seeks some help, usually from a therapist or support group, with the twist being that their job is very…hmm… “non-traditional.” This reveal causes the bright and sunny every day world of friendship and support, positive reinforcement and healing energy to crash headlong into a darker world of monsters, blood, and the darkest of dark shadows, often with hilarious results. Y’know… like they do “therapy speak” while dismembering a victim or something. “I’m acknowledging my regret, and actualizing my inner me,” and then firing up a chainsaw, that kind of thing. Hijinks ensue, as the kids say.

In this case, Renfield is a man who is struggling with the daily grind of being in a seemingly eternal toxic relationship with the Father of Lies, the Lord of Death, a creature of darkness once known as the Prince of Wallachia, once a man called Vlad Tepes, and Vlad the Impaler, but is now known as the vampire… Count Dracula.

His Master.

It’s really nothing but cute fluff with a lot of splatter-gore, with the one big selling point that it features Gen X’s greatest living actor, Nicolas Cage, as Dracula.

So, obviously there’s some upsides here, but in the end, there’s just not enough going on to otherwise make up the fact that it really is nothing but shallow fluff. Cute, sure, but really shallow.

Going in, I didn’t know this was a project being brought to us by Director Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War) and comic book writer Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead, Invincible) but afterwards, it made sense, as they’re both creators I generally think of as “all hat, no cattle.”

That’s what’s going on here.

The movie is fine. It’s cute, but mostly meh. There’s some good ideas, even a little bit of absolutely brilliant shit… like Renfield’s origin sequence, for instance. Loved that. Totally fantastic. Also, it maybe doesn’t need to be said, but Nicolas Cage as Dracula is perfect. He mixes the classic Bella Lugosi Dracula sensibilities with streaks of pure unadulterated Nic Cage charisma and a hefty amount of monstrous menace. I loved it, and I’d love to see more of him in this role, but… just not in this movie, and definitely not by these creators… who just aren’t very good.

But the rest of the film…? It’s fine.

Meh.