Questaholic - October 2023

Happy (early) Halloween, questfans! To kick off the spooky season, I've got a fresh horror-comedy for you; almost as fresh as I've ever done in this column, this is a film that only came out in...April? Strange time to release a vampire film, but whatever, we'll roll with it. Let's dive in.

The plot of Renfield is kind of a nothingburger, so we'll breeze through it: the film follows Robert Monatgue Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who has been serving as the faithful servant of Count Dracula (Nicholas Cage) for nigh on a century - this being a world where the events of the novel Dracula never happened - which mostly means procuring his master's "meals", cleaning up the castle after vampire hunter attacks, and relocating the pair to a new abode when the heat gets too high. We pick up in now-ish New Orleans where Renfield, facing crisis of conscience, has started attending a codependency support group in search of victims - by abducting their abusers and feeding them to his master. Unfortunately his latest choice has recently stolen drugs from the local crime family, the Lobos, and Renfield's attempted abduction intersects with Lobo scion Teddy (Ben Schwartz) showing up with a hitman to deal with that. The chaos ends up dragging Renfield into the sphere of Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), an honest New Orleans cop with a personal vendetta against the Lobos, whose courage in the face of absolute fucked-ness prompts Renfield to stand up for himself and leave Dracula's service. Conflict ensues.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice the "codependent support group" mentioned above, which is something of an anachronistic element in a vampire movie, and that leads into one of the film's two major gimmicks: Renfield isn't really a vampire film, it's a film about getting out of an abusive relationship that uses vampirism as a metaphor. As metaphors go, it's a pretty good one - vampires do literally drain the life from their victims, after all - and the film treats it with more nuance than you'd expect. One moment that particularly stood out to me is late in the film, where Renfield admits to Rebecca that, despite his claims earlier on, Dracula didn't use any supernatural power to entice Renfield into his service: Renfield started out as an ambitious real estate lawyer in the 1800s (which is true to the original book), and all Dracula had to do was promise to make him rich. This acknowledgement that people get into abusive relationships for a reason, and that those relationships often do have genuinely positive elements which are used to justify not getting the hell out of dodge, is something you don't see a lot of in pop culture.

Where the metaphor starts falling down for me is when Renfield starts drawing on real-world techniques for dealing with codependence, which kinda don't work in his situation. Jarringly, there's a scene where Renfield shares his story at the support group (couched in euphemism, because he can't come out and say that he's a vampire's servant), and the group leader reinforces that Dracula has power because Renfield gives him power, and that power can be taken back, and challenges Renfield over what would happen if he just stops meeting "his boss's" needs. Renfield's answer is "he won't grow to full power", but the film shows Dracula gaining power perfectly well without Renfield being around - shown visually by his appearance gradually becoming more Bela Lugosi and less Nosferatu. The intended metaphorical meaning is, I think, something to the effect of "no serious negative consequences will occur, and I'll be able to devote my energy towards fulfilling my own needs", which is true enough for a normal relationship, but falls down when we're talking about an immortal vampire who explicitly plans to take over the world, and is clearly able to find willing followers to help him (given that in the third act he teams up with the Lobos, who are unironically thrilled to bits).

In fairness to the film, this dissonance might be intentional; Renfield's first share happens fairly early in the film, and Dracula goes on to demonstrate considerable power over Renfield after this, including slaughtering the support group while Renfield watches helplessly. It's not until the end of the film, when Renfield and Rebecca literally hack Dracula into tiny bits, encase the bits in concrete, and throw them in the sewer, that Renfield can actually move on with his life. So this might be a dig at well-meaning but naive social workers who spout aphorisms instead of actually trying to understand the situation. Is that giving the film too much credit? Discuss in the comments.

Even more jarring than that, however, is that the film largely ignores that Renfield is guilty of very serious crimes. The film uses the "procures victims for Dracula to eat" part of Renfield's service as part of its metaphor, equating it to people in abusive relationships becoming a worse version of themselves, but glosses over the fact that in Renfield's case "the worst version of himself" is the most prolific serial killer the world has ever known. I don't think this would grate so much, except that the film keeps drawing attention to it; that description is a direct quote, coming from Rebecca's FBI agent sister who has run a sample of (unbeknowst to them, but knownst to us) Renfield's blood through federal databases, which came back linked to decades worth of missins persons cases. Dracula himself points this out early in the film, telling Renfield that he is Renfield's only hope because of all the terrible things he's done in Dracula's service; this is played as part of Drac's manipulation (common in abusive relationships, he positions himself as the only person his victim can rely on), but it's hard to disupte when, again, we're talking about murdering dozens if not hundreds of people.

These are ultimately nitpicks, and it doesn't really ruin the film, just gives you something to complain about after watching. I do hope you still like Renfield's redemption arc, though, because it's pretty much the only string to the film's bow; there are noises that intimate subplots existing, but they all universally go nowhere. The main casualty of this is Rebecca, who is set up as having three narrative functions:

1. She's the catalyst for Renfield's redemption, after he sees her standing up for her principles even in the face of certain death. This is the only function she reliably performs in the film
2. She's coded as a love interest for Renfield, but this is quietly dropped after he leaves a voicemail message asking her to dinner, shortly before Dracula kills his support group and Rebecca discovers him kneeling in their viscera; even after this misunderstanding is cleared up, the topic is never brought up again. Once again this might be intentional, showing Renfield learning to define himself by himself and not by his relationships with others, but that takes a lot of legwork for the viewer
3. She carries a subplot all her own, seeking revenge against the Lobo family after they murdered her father prior to the events of the film

That last is worth expanding on, because it entirely defines Rebecca's character, but is mostly pointless. It's established early on that Rebecca's father was a good cop who was killed by the Lobos - implicitly because he refused a bribe. Her desire for revenge is her primary - and, really, only - character motivation, and following up on leads is what leads her to Renfield's world and kicks off the plot. It's also demonstrably ruining her life; it's varying implied and stated outright that her single-minded pursuit of the Lobos, and frustration that justice isn't coming along fast enough, alienates her from her co-workers and from her family. This is something her sister, in her first (of three!) scenes, calls her on, pointing out that getting actual justice out of an organized crime syndicate requires patient and meticulous casework, which Rebecca is uninterested in.

This is a fairly meaty subplot, but it ultimately goes nowhere. We learn towards the end of the second act that Rebecca's career has stagnated because she's the only cop who isn't in the Lobo's pockets, rather than because she's an abrasive prick, and although Teddy Lobo gets his comuppance - killed by Renfield, not even by Rebecca herself! - his mother and head of the Family disappears without a trace, and everybody seems fine with this. It could perhaps be inferred that she gets arrested, after all many people are killed on her property in the climax, including the chief of police, a federal agent (though she gets brought back to life through Magic), and a couple dozen of her own enforcers, but it feels odd that nobody thinks this worth commenting on.

I should point out here that, in research, multiple resources state that the Elder Lobo is seen getting arrested in the climax; if so, I completely missed it. Some of that is on me for not paying close enough attention, but still: you'd think the resolution of the deuteragonist's primary character arc would warrant more pomp and circumstance than a single, easy-to-miss shot.

End of the day, this is an intriguing film that doesn't spend enough time developing itself to stand as much more than one clever idea...

...oh, actually; two other things worth noting. First is that I called the toxic relationship metaphor the film's "first gimmick"; the second gimmick is the violence, which is so gratuitous that Peter Jackson thinks it goes a bit far (this joke relies on remembering that Peter Jackson made his name in gross-out comedies like Meet the Feebles before pivoting to CGI-heavy tests of bladder endurance; it was very clever, and you should laugh). That's hyperbole, but not very much; even aside from the standard bloodsucking you get from any vampire film, there are no less than four extended fight scenes featuring Renfield, roided up on Dracula magic, mowing through mooks like a Benihana chef on PCP, showering the surroundings in blood and viscera. It was so extreme that the film had to be significantly digitally edited to get even a "mature" rating in certain theatrical markets (*cough* Australia *cough*). The effect is kind of novel at first, but it's so excessive that the gore loses all impact, and you start wishing the film spent more time on characters and plot rather than another ten-minute wire sequence.

The second note also functions as a retrospective editing note. See, usually I pepper these reviews with stills from the film, to break up the wall of text, illustrate points, and occasionally for jokes (for a certain definition of "joke"), but I haven't done that this time. The main reason is that it's very hard to find images of the film that feature anything other than Nicholas Cage's Dracula, who has utterly dominated the marketing. This is a shame, because although he is as fun to watch as the Cagemaster ever is, and his presence looms large over the plot, he's not actually in the film very much; if he has twenty minutes of screentime, I'd be astonished.

So there you go: this is a potato chip film, enjoyable enough in the moment but too insubstantial to devote much time to thinking about after. Certainly not worth writing eighteen hundred words about.

Wait...

Shit.