“Renfield” has no mystery, no poetry, no grandeur. It’s a scattershot lark jam-packed with “ideas,” none of which totally take hold.
Renfield, embodied by Nicholas Hoult as if he were the Hugh Grant of the ’90s playing a neurasthenic British pop star of the ’80s , is introduced at a 12-step meeting for people in codependent relationships, and the film’s overarching joke is that Dracula is an abusive narcissist whose power over Renfield is a form of gaslighting. The 12-step scenes generate a few chuckles, but for the joke to have taken hold the partnership between Dracula and Renfield needed to be drawn with more depth.
After helping set up Dracula’s lair in the bowels of the Old Charity Hospital, Renfield moves into his own place and gives himself a makeover — a more conservative haircut and a sweater out of an old Benetton commercial. He steps away from Dracula and becomes a little more boring. I haven’t mentioned the underworld crime-family plot, which feels like something grafted on from another movie. That’s because the director, Chris McKay, working from a script by Ryan Ridley, italicizes everything in a nuance-free way, never creating the organic genre mash-up he’s going for.
Hoult’s Renfield is this shrinking violet, armed with his self-help book about toxic narcissism, but in the fight scenes he’s a kamikaze, using dripping limbs as spears, punching out heads or tearing off faces, the blood gushing up in Hawaiian Punch geysers. He’s whatever the movie needs him to be. The calculation at the core of “Renfield” is a cynical one: The filmmakers know that an action film will be bigger at the box office than something that’san oddball Nick Cage vampire film.
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