Warning: Spoilers for Renfield to follow.
Renfield was, by many unfortunate metrics, a failure; beyond bombing at the box office with a measly $24 million gross against its $65 million production budget, it didn’t exactly sit well with critics, either, with a 57 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an equally shameful score of 53 on Metacritic. Apparently, not even the prospect of Nicolas Cage’s Dracula could save Renfield from its fate.
But to hell with the myopic weight we put on a film’s financial merits, to hell with the scoff-happy critics, and to hell with not giving a film credit where credit is due because Renfield was no failure; it was us who failed Renfield.
Indeed, at no point was this tongue-in-cheek Dracula romp ever shy about what it was; from its first trailer to the crawl of the credits, Renfield more than fulfilled its promise and duty as a balls-to-the-wall action-horror-comedy, and that deserves to be admired. More than that, however, Renfield captures a comic book movie ethos that most comic book films could only dream of, and in a cinematic climate littered with capes and crusaders of all shapes and sizes, that deserves much more than mere admiration.
But how exactly does Renfield work as a comic book movie if it’s not even based on a comic book? Well, that question assumes that the DNA of a comic book film lies in its status as an adaptation, when the reality is something much more organic and universal than that. When one hears the words “comic book movie,” the mind immediately jumps to dizzying combat, outlandish characters, and an overall unrelenting embrace of heightened reality.
All of these aspects fit Renfield to a T and then some. There’s a wealth of action scenes, and they set themselves apart from those of other films thanks to their cartoonish levels of gore, a quirky tension point wherein Renfield must eat bugs to gain/keep his superpowers, and kills with enough creativity to make Jason Voorhees jealous. The characters are also undeniably over-the-top, with Cage and Nicholas Hoult absolutely gushing with screen presence while the likes of Ben Schwartz and Awkwafina serve as delightfully unique canvases for the two leads to further exercise their dynamism.
But it’s Renfield‘s handling of its heightened reality that makes it shine as a comic book film like no other. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has always had plenty of fun commenting on how bonkers some of its nuances are, but Renfield isn’t as keen on taking the easy route there.
Like plenty of comic book films, Renfield‘s stakes are actually quite dire. Dracula wants to take over the world, and with Renfield proving his disloyalty time and again throughout the film, the king of vampires eventually teams up with the Lobo crime family to realize his heinous ambition (a textbook comic book premise if I ever saw one, may I add).
But what makes Renfield so fascinating is how little mind it pays to the macro stakes in comparison to Renfield’s character arc. Is Renfield aware that he probably shouldn’t let Dracula take over the world? Yes. Is it convenient that Renfield completing this arc happens to intersect with stopping Dracula? Also yes, but that’s part of the beauty of it all.
The best comic book stories boil down to inspiring character arcs dressed up as saving the world with flashy superpowers, and Renfield is one of the best to have done so in recent years. Amid the mass murder and encroaching darkness threatening to engulf the world, at no point does Renfield ever let us forget that this is a story about abusive relationships and the grit that comes with separating oneself from a narcissist, as Renfield ultimately does in the end. And while he may solve his problem by chopping up his abuser and encasing the remains in tiny blocks of concrete, who’s to say we weren’t meant to take that message at face value?
All kidding aside, Renfield may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it managed to tell a grounded, relatable story against a backdrop that begged to be anything but, and on top of offering up a delectable helping of chuckles, spectacle, and straight-up fun, Renfield deserves the highest honors as a comic book film.
