Renfield; A Fangtastic Time

Nicholas Cage is not the Dracula we deserve, but the Dracula we need!

With Nosferatu dominating the box offices with all its gothic, avant-garde glory you may need something a little more light-hearted to cleanse the palette. 2023’s Renfield is a fantastic recipe of dark comedy, satire, and not a small amount of heart (beating or otherwise). Renfield has recently been added to Netflix UK’s menu; for us all to feast upon! 

Both Nick (Hoult and Cage respectively) give fantastic performances as master and long-suffering servant, proving that toxic relationships take many forms. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) has been in the service of Dracula (Nicolas Cage) for ninety years. Renfield does everything short of cleaning the count’s iconic cape (it’s dry-clean only apparently) and he’s quite frankly sick of it. 

After ninety years the duo’s options, and bank account, have become quite limited. This is why they are holed in an abandoned hospital in New Orleans. Renfield leaves most evenings to supply the ancient vampire with victims to drain blood, preferably of the pure variety. Hoult’s Renfield is a charming soft boy, a 6 ft 2 soft boy, who has some reservations about killing innocent people. He cleverly gets around this moral quandary by joining a support group for the victims of narcissistic abuse held in a local church and eh…dispatching the group members’ abusers to bring to his master. This works well until one night he gets tangled up with the criminal underworld on a ‘routine’ dispatching.

Awkwafina plays the pint-sized police officer with a foul mouth and a strict(ish) moral compass; Rebecca Quincy. Rebecca and Renfield cross paths and it’s up to them to save the city from both criminal and supernatural corruption. This results in many impressively choreographed fight scenes and not a small amount of blood, gore, and sarcasm! It’s strangely heartwarming to watch Renfield try to break the cycle of Dracula’s narcissistic abuse and create a place for himself in the world. As Rebecca states: sometimes you just fall under the thrall of a vampire for a few decades!

Nicholas Cage is every bit as fabulous and camp as you’d expect of a truly iconic Dracula performance. His delivery is as cutting and precise as his debonair velvet suits. One of the best things about the film is you can tell the cast is having fun with their characters, particularly Cage, I would bet my own soul that a lot of his lines were ad-libbed. Special shout-out goes to Brandon Scott Jones who played the painfully sincere narcissistic survivor group leader. Jones proves there is no part too small to make an impact!

Renfield takes the usual Dracula tropes and puts a hilarious spin on them. Asking the real questions like; do vampires need a verbal invite or will a ‘welcome’ mat suffice to enter a home? Quick someone page Buffy! 

Even with the gratuitous gore and violence Renfield manages to be touching at times and ironically breathes fresh life into the reanimated corpses of both Dracula and Renfield.

Three and a half stars.