Renfield
Dracula returns in the form of Nicolas Cage in a pantomime of gory excess.
Blood and nonsense: Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage
Everybody makes mistakes. Maybe on paper Renfield appeared more interesting and anarchic than its bizarre execution now manifests. But how Nicholas Hoult can plummet from the black comedy of the multi-Oscar-nominated The Favourite to the black comedy of this misconceived tripe is head-spinning. Perhaps it’s the Nicolas Cage factor. Hoult actually played Cage’s son in The Weather Man back in 2005 and maybe that planted a seed of admiration. After all, it was Cage who famously ate a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss (1988), before going on to win an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas (1995). Of course, his track record has since been sullied by such fiascos as Left Behind, Arsenal, Grand Isle and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and this really, really won’t help.
Nicholas Hoult plays Robert Montague Renfield, a real estate lawyer who becomes enslaved by the powers of the Prince of Darkness – aka Count Dracula – and now acts as his supplier of fresh bodies. In return, Dracula (Cage) bequeaths him eternal life and, when Renfield gobbles an insect or two, superhuman strength. Following a run-in with some vampire hunters in Europe, Renfield relocates his Master to New Orleans where they can establish a new footing. But there’s a hitch: the city is overrun by gun-toting gangsters with the police in their pocket, which just leaves one honest cop, Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), to fight the good fight – against the hoodlums, her own department and an insatiable supernatural force…
The snag here is the tone. The first five minutes alone are exhausting, what with the ear-piercing sound effects, geysers of human offal and improbably goofy villains. When Renfield separates a man’s head from his shoulders with a single punch, we know we are in trouble. But the tsunami of Pythonesque gore for its own sake has no balance of wit for the excess. Hoult, who attempts to channel the endearing awkwardness of a young Hugh Grant, is wasted in a lunatic farce in which over-acting is the order of the day. In fact, there’s over-acting and then there’s mentally impaired showing off, a style that Cage has come to adopt of late.
There’s also a running joke in which Renfield is repeatedly disembowelled, as well as a litany of extreme profanity and the snorting of cocaine, which makes one question the film’s 15 certificate in the UK (it’s an ‘R’ in the US). It is one of the most explicitly bloody films in recent memory, but because the sight of facial decay, say, is so terribly grotesque here, it lacks the power to shock, not unlike a poorly assembled effigy on Guy Fawkes Night. Spectacular prosthetics and CGI have now become so commonplace that they have lost any bearing in the real world. But plausibility is the least of Renfield’s problems.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Nicolas Cage, Brandon Scott Jones, Adrian Martinez, Bess Rous, James Moses Black, Camille Chen, Christopher Matthew Cook, T.C. Matherne, Jenna Kanell, William Ragsdale.
Dir Chris McKay, Pro Robert Kirkman, David Alpert, Bryan Furst, Sean Furst and Chris McKay, Screenplay Ryan Ridley, from a story by Robert Kirkman, Ph Mitchell Amundsen, Pro Des Alec Hammond, Ed Ryan Folsey, Giancarlo Ganziano and Mako Kamitsuna, Music Marco Beltrami, Costumes Lisa Lovaas, Sound Tim Walston and Erick Ocampo.
Skybound Entertainment/Giant Wildcat-Universal Pictures.
93 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 14 April 2023. Cert. 15.
