Renfield: Dracula comedy fails to leave much of a mark

RM Renfield is much more than Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in the Dracula story, but the beetle-scoffing sycophant – close to a Gollum in some versions – does deserve some time in ... well, not the sun obviously, but a brighter square of moonlight perhaps.

Such distinguished personnel as Tom Waits, Klaus Kinski, Mark Gatiss and Jack Shepherd have had a crack. Now, Nicholas Hoult, an appropriately reserved sort of movie star, becomes the first to tackle the role eponymously (in a feature, anyway). Nicolas Cage plays a cacophonous second fiddle as his eternally thirsty employer.

Renfield is a rum business. Director Chris McKay came to prominence on Robot Chicken, an Adult Swim animation, and the script retains that network’s irreverent approach to storytelling. The film is a riotous, bloody, self-aware, suspiciously short romp through Dracula mythos and contemporary discontents. One is never entirely sure when it is being dumb on purpose and when it is just being dumb. Awkwafina knows how to make the most of thinly written comic-action support – she seemed to do so for hours in Marvel’s Shang-Chi – but she can’t quite shuffle away the cliches surrounding a cop seeking to make up for her late father’s failures on the force. That trope is one step away from “last day before I retire” cop-flick hokum.

Maybe the makers know that. Maybe the whole thing is an exercise in winking pastiche. It is certainly rich in reference. Renfield begins with Universal raiding its catalogue to flesh out backstory with clips of Dwight Frye playing the definitive Renfield to Bela Lugosi’s count in the studio’s 1931 version. The subsequent decades have taken the pair across the world before settling on contemporary New Orleans (most famously exploited as a haunt of vampires in Anne Rice’s novels).

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The decision to have Renfield attend group therapy sessions for those in toxically interdependent relationships is not just a cheap gag. Bram Stoker’s source novel did really get at a class of neurotic self-abasement that has become ever more conspicuous in the age of noxious fandom. The script has much fun with empathetic group members misunderstanding the seriousness of Renfield’s complaints. They have been through a lot. But they haven’t been required to deliver still-living human meat to their aggressive other.

[ Nicolas Cage on playing Dracula: ‘You supplant one addiction – like alcohol or heroin or sex – with blood and we can relate to that’ ]

It hardly needs to be said that Cage leaps at the opportunity to literally guzzle the guts of passersby and figuratively drink the blood of a few hundred earlier Princes of Darkness. Kim Newman, who knows more about Dracula than most of us know about our own feet, has traced Cage’s look here – top hat, all teeth equally pointy – back to the lost Lon Chaney film London after Midnight. As far as Dracula predecessors go, this version owes more to the many comic incarnations than to the gloomy efforts of Max Schreck or Gary Oldman. This is pure dress-up, enhanced by a spitting fury that only this still-singular actor can muster. He would be more at home in Carry on Screaming than in anything from the adjacent Hammer Film Productions.

The film stages excellent comedy punch-ups much influenced by the good work of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s. The gallons of blood – as clearly intended – soon take on the quality of the filling in slapstick custard pies (a trick pulled off better in Lee Cronin’s imminent Evil Dead Rise). All of which is perfectly good fun. But one can’t shake the sense that this 93-minute film has lost a deal of its secondary plotting along the way to release. The crime story that places Shohreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz on different rungs of a hoodlum dynasty is perfunctory to the point of irrelevance. Awkwafina barely gets the chance to make sense of her character.

Mid-grade comedy Drac at best. Diverting for all that.