Renfield (2023) was a box office corpse—$65M budget, $26M gross—yet it’s a surprisingly fun splatter-comedy that deserved better.
Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield, Dracula’s eternally abused familiar. For centuries, he’s been the one covering up massacres, dragging corpses back to the lair, and nursing his master to health every time a vampire hunter gets lucky. The cycle never ends.
Now, he’s sneaking off to therapy groups, wondering if self-actualization is possible when your boss is the Prince of Darkness. That opening sequence even splices Hoult and Cage into footage from Dracula (1931), erasing Dwight Frye and Bela Lugosi as if Universal’s monsters had been quietly recast all along.
Of course, the main draw is Nicolas Cage. He isn’t just chewing scenery for the meme reels—he literally had his teeth shaved down so he could wear ultra-thin 3D-printed fangs and still enunciate through dialogue. Some prosthetic setups weighed twenty pounds, giving him a hulking, unnatural presence. His performance is theatrical, imperious, magnetic. The tragedy is that we don’t see nearly enough of him.
Hoult, though, is no slouch. His Renfield is a perfect blend of pained and pathetic, especially when he pops bugs for power. Those aren’t CGI snacks either—Hoult actually ate potato bugs, crickets, and caramel cockroaches on set. Director Chris McKay even joined him for solidarity, while Cage—who once swallowed live roaches in Vampire’s Kiss—declined this time. The running gag works because Hoult sells both the disgust and the absurdity.
The side cast adds texture. Shohreh Aghdashloo commands the screen as a crime boss in New Orleans, and Ben Schwartz revels in playing her inept, whiny son. Awkwafina, unfortunately, is stranded in the role of a hard-boiled cop—it’s a part that never quite fits her comic timing or voice.
What really makes the movie tick are the fight scenes. McKay insisted on gallons of practical blood—enough to paint half of Bourbon Street—and it pays off. Limbs fly, torsos burst, and the choreography gleefully turns gore into slapstick weapons. Even behind the camera, chaos spilled into real life: during production, more than twenty crew cars were broken into, a touch of crime mirroring the crime family on screen.
Renfield wasn’t the launchpad Universal wanted for its “Monsterverse.” Opening against Mario, John Wick 4, and The Pope’s Exorcist sealed its fate. But what survives is a film that reframes Dracula as a toxic boss and Renfield as a burnt-out employee desperate for freedom.
For that alone, it’s worth watching. And as long as Nicolas Cage keeps sinking his fangs into projects like this, I’ll keep showing up.
Where to watch:
Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81642086
@movies@piefed.social
My experience with this film was overwhelmingly positive but cut the other way.
What I saw was a deliberate and not-at-all veiled allegory for classic narcissistic abuse, its victims, and how victimhood can be self-perpetuating until you get help and break free. I would go as far as to say that it's both affirming, supportive, and informative to that end. There's even a not-so-subtle explanation as to why you don't see group therapy for this sort of thing (it's on purpose and absolutely necessary).
Everything else is fun acting, action scenes, special effects, set dressing, homage to old horror films, you name it, it's in here. It all serves the story's core premise brilliantly and keeps an otherwise dreadful topic - perhaps all to real for some of the audience - palatable for the film's runtime.