Long the butt of jokes about his explosive, unpredictable acting style, Nicolas Cage is currently in the midst of a great reversal of fortune, as he’s being embraced, both critically and commercially, in a way that he hasn’t been since the early 1990s, if ever. But if Cage’s taste for the extreme is finally being taken seriously in broader circles, the second wind that’s empowering his career continues to result, more times than not, in films that are frustratingly dialed into the notion of shrouding his manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.
The latest case in point is Chris McKay’s Renfield, which dangles the intoxicating prospect of watching Cage sink his teeth into the role of Count Dracula but delivers it in the form of a kind of gig economy send-up centered on his assistant, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Renfield is a bug-eating madman hopelessly in thrall to his undead master, but here he’s mostly a put-upon errand boy, one for whom procuring fresh victims for the boss is just another tedious task alongside taking his blood-spattered cloak to the dry cleaners.
There’s comic potential in following Dracula’s put-upon procurer, but the film quickly gets stuck in the same rut that defines so much contemporary comedy cinema. That is, the order of the day here is less building setups and punchlines than having characters pull a long face.
The latter is particularly embodied by Rebecca Quincey (Awkwafina), a police officer who patrols the New Orleans neighborhood where Renfield and Dracula move at the start of the film. As she becomes exposed to the grisly activities of her new love interest, she’s regularly left with nothing to do but state aloud whatever gory brutality she witnesses, as if verbalizing it constituted a joke. Of the many examples of this, one that stands out is the moment that Rebecca, upon seeing Renfield slice through a man’s arms using nothing more than a restaurant serving plate, quizzically asks, “Did you just sever a man’s arms using a serving dish?”
For his part, Hoult plays Renfield as a show of two-dimensional codependency, his eyes downcast in Dracula’s presence and his words meekly trailing off every time he tries to speak up for his own desires. And when there are jokes, they cover topics so hackneyed that the actors seem as if they’re about to wink at the camera. There are multiple riffs on ska music, a genre about which every conceivable joke was already made before the end of the 20th century.
Besides these stale one-liners, much of Renfield’s comedy rests on the extremity of its bloodletting, which runs well past the sight of fangs sinking into necks into a realm of seemingly endless dismemberment and disembowelment that produces a level of blood on the order of an Evil Dead film. Renfield, bestowed with super strength by his master, is just as capable of ripping apart people as his boss, and his attempts to target only the seediest elements of society allots him a morally guilt-free romp through the viscera of various criminals and mobsters.
If the gore is perhaps too maximalist, it nonetheless brings to the fore McKay’s talents. The filmmaker comes from an extensive background in animation, which may explain why a movie about a notoriously sunlight-averse creature is so brightly colored and ebulliently lit, a reflection of Renfield’s efforts to extricate himself from his boss’s influence. Even Dracula’s lairs are colored in sickly phosphorescent greens that match his pallid and rotted flesh.
Certainly the film’s action has more than a little cartoonishness to it, what with the sight of Renfield tearing off assailants’ limbs and using them as clubs suggesting Tom and Jerry in extremis. Sadly, these moments are infrequent compared to the leaden self-actualization comedy, and nearly every memorable image was used for the film’s red band trailer.
Renfield’s focus on Dracula’s beleaguered assistant ultimately spoils its best element: Cage’s truly committed and inspired performance. The actor takes cues from many Draculas of films past—from the Eastern European drawl and arch hand gestures of Bela Lugosi to the unpredictable mood swings of Christopher Lee—but he filters them through his own array of oddball mannerisms, such as an abrupt titter in the midst of a growling threat or a bobbing head movement, suggesting a bird pecking at an object, trying to determine if it might be food.
Cage is the only person involved in Renfield who nails the script’s codependency angle, orienting Dracula’s established abilities to hypnotize others entirely around a cajoling, manipulative set of phrases that break down the emotional defenses of Renfield and others without any need of magic. It’s a seductive, grotesque, hilarious performance, and it’s one that ironically reinforces Dracula’s taunts of Renfield’s inadequacy and weakness by saying everything that Renfield wants to say on his own behalf far better and in more entertaining fashion.
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