Review: Nicholas Hoult plays the title character, Dracula’s assistant, but it’s Nicolas Cage as the famous bloodsucker who steals the show
There’s a rom-com buried somewhere in “Renfield,” to be sure. As the title character, Hoult plays a World War I-era lawyer who has traveled to Transylvania to seek his fortune in real estate; while there, he crosses paths with a wealthy recluse named Count Dracula , who promises eternal life to Renfield in exchange for becoming Dracula’s servant.
Now more than a century old, Renfield has fetched up in New Orleans, where he’s tasked with finding fresh prey for his bloodsucking boss , and where he has begun attending self-help meetings for codependency. He also meets-not-very-cute with a NOLA police officer named Rebecca , whose vendetta against a local crime family entangles her with Dracula’s own evil enterprise.
Directed by Chris McKay from a script written by Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman, “Renfield” plays like one big inside joke, with Renfield’s crisp English narration interrupted at precise intervals by scenes of gory, squishy, spurting and head-exploding mayhem. The hyper-violence, which only grows more repetitive as it increases in velocity and viscosity, is balanced somewhat by genuinely funny sequences, when “Renfield’s” core of absurdism and sweetness manages to peek through.
Still, the frenetic, close-up-heavy aesthetic — whoever photographed “Renfield” must have graduated from the Garden Hose School of Cinematography — becomes monotonous and boringly gross over time, and despite Hoult’s most appealing efforts, even someone of his native charm can’t generate much believable chemistry with Awkwafina, who spends most of the movie in a grumpy, slump-shouldered scowl.
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