Renfield (dir. Chris McKay, 2023) — Review

Dracula has long been seen as the ultimate in allegorical tales. Interpreters of the book, including Stephen King and Francis Ford Coppola, have perceived vampires as a floating signifier, resurrecting Victorian-era debates over the agency and sexuality of the “New Woman”: poor, demure Lucy is “turned” by Dracula and suddenly possessed of predatory red lips, seeking her desire on the London streets and getting nailed to her coffin with a phallic stake for her pain. In the Covid era, Dracula works equally well as a novel of epidemiology, read in dialogue with Coppola’s version, released in the days when HIV was still largely considered a death sentence.

Stoker’s tale resonates powerfully today in the way it talks about information: how it spreads, who believes it, who doesn’t. This question, frequently elided in the adaptations, comes with a particularly intriguing, and disquieting, contemporary relevance. Most of the original narrative is framed as correspondence: letters, journal entries (some dictated on that relatively recent invention, the phonograph), telegrams, even newspaper reports — the new, or newly exploding, media of the fin de siècle. This emphasis on immediacy, and the media that could produce it, achieved remarkable effect in re-creating the experience of his characters as they came to grips with Dracula’s monstrosity in real time. We, of course, have an advantage over those poor souls — not just thanks to the benefit of knowing that we’re reading Dracula, not just with 125 years of hindsight, but because we’re given the perspective of all the characters, linearly and panoramically. In its own way, it recalls the flurry of texts, tweets, multiple media that traced the collective period of madness now known as the Trump years, complete with ‘alternative facts’, just as Dracula tampers with the letters.

And more: what protects Dracula the most in London — what allows him to successfully attack Lucy, what allows Lucy to prey on children — is the inability of modern London to believe such a thing as a vampire could possibly exist. In an age of too much information, our preconceptions and precedents take over to help us weed through explanations. In an age of Victorian scientism, that means vampires aren’t an option. The novel offers a resonant lesson about belief in the unbelievable — vampires, evil, and the return of feudal fascism can happen here.

In Chris McKay’s 2023 cinematic take on the story, Nicolas Cage plays, as usual, both his character and Nicolas Cage — he of the notorious crumbling castle and haunted voodoo mansion, he of the bankruptcy-inducing mausoleum. Nicholas Hoult trails in his wake, revelling in his familiar niche of sickly British henchman, his entire bone density concentrated in his cheekbones rather than his spine. Poor Nora from Queens, meanwhile, sells us not just the dregs of her rapper character, but the Asian-American female cop Rebecca who anchors the whole schlock-fest in a heartwarming tale of generational resentment and family healing.

Most delectably of all, the movie works as a serviceable read on the Campaign Trail 2024. The ‘woke’, psychobabble-slanging support group for codependents, in which we initially and hilariously encounter Renfield, doesn’t stand a chance against the Big Bad. Renfield, an incompetent, sappy but likeable relic of a bygone era, makes an unlikely hero for the urban disaffected: not unlike a certain octogenarian making another tilt for the White House, if he can stay on his own two feet for long enough.

Dracula, meanwhile, the ‘Old Evil’ in cahoots with the amoral and the money-hungry of global America, brings a serving of showmanship and bombast to his nefarious schemes. And with heroes as bland — dare one even say, ‘sleepy’ — as the two young denizens of the West Coast with whom the audience must sympathize, the inevitable drift back towards fascist pageantry, all-out sleaze and constant rule-breaking starts to look inviting for more than just Awkwafina.

Continuing the analogy, Awkwafina’s beleaguered cop finds herself the Kamala of the piece, with lazily rendered victory drifting into ‘we did it Joe!’ territory. Comparisons seem particularly apt considering her relationship with state law enforcement, not exactly the sexiest of professions to appeal to a left-leaning audience under 45. Once again one wonders: are these the best they could dig up to save America? But, all credit to Nicholas Hoult, his big, sad, lunky face sells the weaponized incompetence of a bumbling, insipid Caucasian cadaver. And when Rebecca runs into his arms with no real justification (after doing all of the actual work to take down their shared foe) it’s hard not to go along with her. Sure, she’s just left her sister shaken by a brief visit to the nether realm and back again, but this spineless, confused old guy truly does his best — and that’s preferable to the alternative.