Review: What ‘Renfield’ Gets Wrong About Dracula
The 2023 film RENFIELD depicts the most famous vampire’s most well-known servant fighting his master for personal freedom. This potentially evocative story has already underperformed at the box office. Yet it did have some potential psychological themes that might have made the movie more popular.
Some context: the 2023 Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult, draws from the two best-known iterations of the fictional character.
The first iteration is of course Bram Stoker’s 1897 DRACULA. The eponymous undead lays plans to move to England in search of new “bleeding-grounds,” and to that end he engages the help of British solicitor Jonathan Harker. A week or two later, while Harker remains imprisoned in Dracula’s castle, Dracula takes up residence in his new English digs. The vampire just happens to live next to an asylum, in which a separate Englishman, R.M. Renfield, suffers from an obsession with eating animals to gain power. Somehow Dracula, who gains real powers from devouring the blood of the living, reaches out to the madman and offers him immortality if he Renfield serves the vampire’s will. Renfield does so for a time, but then becomes penitent when he fears for the soul of Dracula’s main target, Mina Harker. When Renfield rebels, Dracula kills him.
The second iteration is the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi as Dracula, which combines Jonathan Harker with the book’s Renfield to become a composite Renfield, played by actor Dwight Frye. Aside from that, Renfield’s arc is fairly close to his narrative in the book. This character is motivated, though, not by a promise of immortality but by the fact that Dracula has partly vampirized Renfield, which breaks the Englishman’s will and brings him under the vampire’s control.
The current movie posits that Dracula (Nicolas Cage) was not slain in any of his early encounters with vampire hunters, but that the vampire’s undead existence is preserved by Renfield until 2023. This Renfield, in background closest to the 1931 composite, possesses a form of ageless immortality, which may or may not result from partial vampirization. In addition, Renfield, termed a “familiar,” can boost his strength and healing-abilities by eating bugs. This seems to be an ancillary feature, like Popeye’s spinach, and not a necessity to maintain agelessness.
So after over a hundred years of concealing Dracula’s hiding places and luring victims into the vamp’s grasp, what monumental revelation causes Renfield to rebel against his master? Well, RENFIELD is a comedy, so– it’s a co-dependency class.
Yes, this notion is funny– for a little while. Unfortunately, the Robert Kirkman script runs this idea, among others, into the ground. Despite some flashbacks to the life Renfield deserted when he became a familiar, the character’s motivations remain only “vein-deep,” shall we say. He gets an additional boost of inspiration from lady cop Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), but their relationship is ill-defined, and Rebecca’s an even less rounded character than Renfield.
But then– there’s the slave’s master. And whether this take on Dracula stems more from Kirkman or from Nicolas Cage, the vampiric Count shows a potential that could have lifted RENFIELD above its mediocrity.
I like many of the cinematic interpretations of the master vamp, no matter how far from the book they may diverge. But Bram Stoker didn’t mean for his undead lord to be appealing. Original Dracula is not a noble defender of his country, a continental charmer, or a cuddly teddy-bear with a thing for evening wear. Original Dracula is a repulsive creature, an aristocrat who believes that everyone else on the planet exists to serve him in one way or another. No, the original Dracula is only admirable in one way: he always knows what he wants.
And that’s why I’m a little uncertain as to whether Kirkman got that aspect, because his script doesn’t consistently reflect this quality. Yet Nicolas Cage’s performance does, because he brings to the vampire something not in Stoker: a mordant sense of humor. Even when half-dying for lack of nourishment, Cage’s Dracula displays utter contempt for the humanity he’s left behind. Yes, Kirkman knew it was funny to have Dracula tell Renfield to bring him a bus full of nuns, but the lines by themselves don’t make clear how greatly Dracula’s willpower contrasts with the modern world, where terms like “co-dependency” are used to dumb down the inherent contentiousness of human nature.
In essence, Kirkman dodges any meaningful contrast between the aristocratic world of Dracula and the modern world of pop psychology. I think that even in the context of a gory comedy, a writer could find a logical way to make “the New World” triumph over “the Old World” without seeming to be on the side of modern mediocrity.
I can’t be sure anyone else would have liked to see something like this, and perhaps more ambitious writing would have still resulted in lousy box office . But audiences must not have heard anything about RENFIELD that made them rush to the theaters, like they did for TOP GUN MAVERICK and SPIDER MAN: NO WAY HOME. And to modify the famous saying, failure is an orphan whose existence can be blamed on many hypothetical fathers.
Did you see Renfield ? Ifg hat did you think? Sound off in the comments.
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