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25 May 2023

Nicolas Cage sinks his teeth into the role of Dracula in Renfield

Scott Hocking

STACK Senior Editor

Dracula’s long-suffering, bug-eating servant R. M. Renfield is moved centre stage in director Chris McKay’s horror-comedy, with its trump card the casting of Nicolas Cage as the legendary vampire.

The result is a wild blend of frenetic action, cartoonish splatter, and laughs that reins in Cage’s usual gonzo grandstanding, consigning him to a supporting role where less is ultimately more.

Opening with a wonderful black and white recreation of the 1931 classic Dracula to introduce the characters, the movie finds Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) and Dracula holed up in an abandoned New Orleans hospital, where the latter is recuperating following a run-in with vampire hunters that has left him overcooked.

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Desperate to break free from the control of his undead master and begin a new life, Renfield joins a support group for those trapped in toxic relationships and decides to help his fellow members by feeding their abusive partners to Dracula.

But his plan backfires disastrously, putting him on the radar of the notorious Lobo crime family and its husky-voiced matriarch (the wonderful Shohreh Aghdashloo from TV’s The Expanse), as well as a local cop (Awkwafina) hellbent on revenge against the Lobos for killing her father.

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Meanwhile, the newly regenerated Dracula isn’t about to let go of his “familiar” and seizes the opportunity to use the Lobos to fulfill his desire for world domination…

Throughout the decades, we’ve seen many screen incarnations of Renfield (including Dwight Frye, Tom Waits, and Klaus Kinski), but Nicholas Hoult’s portrayal is the most unconventional to date.

The deranged, asylum-bound character of Bram Stoker’s novel and previous films has been transformed into a foppish Hugh Grant-type, who’s lacking in self-confidence but capable of transforming into a limb-ripping man of action following a feast of bugs!

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The movie may be about Renfield, but what moviegoers will be paying to see is how the idiosyncratic Nic Cage interprets one of horror cinema’s greatest characters.

Having previously dabbled in vampirism in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss (where he gobbled up a live cockroach, Renfield-style), Cage sinks his teeth into the role of Dracula with gusto but surprisingly doesn’t chew the scenery.

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Rather than going completely bat-poop crazy, he treats it with the respect it deserves, channelling the best of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman’s Draculas in a performance that manages to be both sinister and goofy. Needless to say, the film is at its best whenever he’s on screen.

Renfield often resembles two different movies spliced together; the action and crime family elements feel a bit incongruous and don’t work nearly as well as they did in John Landis’s mobster vampire gem Innocent Blood (1992). Nevertheless, it still delivers enough gory mayhem, inspired gags involving vampire lore, and Nic Cage insanity to guarantee a bloody good time.

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