Renfield is a fun but slight movie. So slight that it holds it back from greatness. It’s a meta action/horror/comedy hybrid that manages its various genres pretty well.

The movie stars Nicholas Holt as Renfield, forever the familiar to the literal Count Dracula (as played by Nicolas Cage). Drac is in one of his regular regeneration states after getting defeated – again – by the forces of light. Renfield splits his time between co-dependency group therapy sessions and delivering up jerks for Dracula to feed on.

So the big angle is taking the servant and making him the (self-actualized) star. It plays on a meta level with the Dracula story, leaning on our familiarity with the villain in pop-culture. It’s a cute idea and the movie does a few things with it… but never quite enough.

Nicolas Cage is in full-weird mode and is pretty great as Dracula. He looks the part, especially in some fun re-enactments of the 1931 film. I could see him playing Bela Lugosi in a serious remake or sequel (or maybe even The Man Who Laughs). He’s not the star of the movie though so you’ll go long stretches without his manic energy.

Hoult and Awkwafina (as a cop) are the actual stars and play pretty well off each other. He’s fine but she great playing against her usual slacker persona. They both deliver up some pretty decent laughs.

The biggest laughs though – at least for me – were the extremely gory deaths during surprisingly cool action scenes. It’s the kind of blood splatter overdrive that makes an audience scream and laugh at the same time. If that’s not your bag, this movie might be one exploding head too many.

This is a genuinely pretty good film. I wish it had been better… wish that it had been funnier, leaned more into the meta commentary, or if it just had more ambition and didn’t feel so slight. But it’s still a pretty good film with a cool idea and some very good performances.

Score: 84