Film Review

Renfield (2023)

Renfield, Dracula’s henchman, longs for a life away from the Count and all of the bloodshed that comes with being his servant.

Chris McKay’s pseudo-sequel to Dracula (1931) has an interesting concept for a horror-comedy, with manservant Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) having a crisis of conscience and attending support groups to try and untangle himself from the toxic relationship he’s in with Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage). Although even the group Renfield’s meeting with was initially just a means to find the whereabouts of bad people, who at least deserve to be sucked dry by a vampire.

The amusing but slim concept behind Renfield isn’t enough to sustain even a 93-minute movie, but the film’s greatest weakness is a failure to realise we’re here to see Nicolas Cage play Dracula. This marks Cage’s return to a major studio release since the flop of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011) pushed him into more arthouse and low-budget cult films, so there’s undoubted joy in getting to see Cage reprise his infamously awful transatlantic accent from Vampire’s Kiss (1988) and chew the scenery with an impressive…