93 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Renfield has spent decades as Dracula’s familiar, hauling home victims and swallowing abuse from an immortal who treats him like furniture. He joins a support group for people in toxic relationships and starts plotting his exit. Quitting the prince of darkness turns out to be harder than quitting any other bad boss.
Renfield is the familiar of Dracula. For decades he procures victims, disposes of corpses, and absorbs abuse from an immortal narcissist who treats him as property. The film frames this arrangement as a textbook codependent relationship and sends Renfield to a support group for people trapped with toxic partners. The self-help vocabulary becomes the engine of the comedy. The movie is about a man learning to leave a boss who happens to be the prince of darkness.
Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield as a sweet, apologetic doormat who flinches before he speaks. He sells the meek register and the bursts of bug-fueled super strength with the same wide-eyed sincerity. Nicolas Cage plays Dracula as a preening abuser who weaponizes guilt and flattery in the same breath. He commits to the camp without winking at it, and his line readings find menace inside the melodrama. Awkwafina plays Rebecca, a traffic cop nursing a grudge against the crime family that runs the city, and she plays the anger straighter than the material around her. Ben Schwartz plays Tedward Lobo as a needy fail-son while Shohreh Aghdashloo plays his mother Bellafrancesca as the actual threat in the room.
Chris McKay directs the action as cartoon splatter. Ryan Ridley’s screenplay, built from a story by Robert Kirkman, pushes the violence past realism into geysers of blood and severed limbs played for laughs. The editing cuts on each impact so that the gore lands like punchlines. The makeup design tracks Dracula’s recovery, moving Cage from a charred, peeling husk to a restored predator as he feeds. The problem is structural. The script keeps shoving a generic crime-family plot between the support-group jokes, and the two halves never fuse.
The premise is sharp enough to carry a better film than this one. A horror comedy about codependency and Dracula as the ultimate toxic ex has real teeth. The movie keeps reaching for it and then retreating into chase scenes and quips. Cage and Hoult find the relationship the script keeps abandoning. What remains is a fast, bloody, scattered comedy that knows exactly what it is about and refuses to stay there long enough to mean it.