'Renfield' Is Bloody Good Fun

'Renfield' is more than just a Dracula spinoff. It's a story about a man who has to come to terms with his past mistakes.

Renfield, the new Dracula spinoff starring Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult is bloody good fun. This film is far from your average Dracula movie though. It's morbidly funny, unique, and unpredictable.

The story revolves around Count Dracula's (Cage) assistant, Robert Montague Renfield (Hoult), who's job is almost exclusively to kill people and bring them to his narcissistic and manipulative boss to eat for energy.

But after nearly a century of unquestioning loyalty to Count Dracula, Renfield realizes that he's not much more than a slave, who's in a toxic, co-dependent relationship with his master.

But Renfield, who's been given the gift of immortality and incredible strength by his boss (which he activates by the oral consumption of bugs), is still quite terrified of his boss though, and reasonably so, because Dracula's magic still greatly outmatches Renfield's gifts. And we learn early on in the film that Renfield separating from the Count will not be easy.

And that's the story: the chronicles of the falling-out and subsequent breakup of Count Dracula and his former assistant. And its simplicity is its strength, because it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with the characters, and laugh at the dialogue and gory action sequences.

Robert Monatgue Renfield's character is fantastic and relatable, but very conflicted. He met and joined forces with Dracula nearly a century ago when he was a struggling real estate attorney who was dissatisfied with his life at the time. He had a wife and child, who he abandoned for a life of excitement, adventure, and the gift of immortality and power, which Dracula promised him if he agreed to leave his boring, average life behind and become Dracula's loyal assistant. But after a nearly a century, Renfield still carries around the guilt and shame of abandoning his family, which he considers a mistake. He also carries around the guilt of all the people he's killed to feed his boss. And this is why Renfield is so likable. He's far from perfect, but he's had enough time to think about his past actions, and he's unhappy with himself and regrets the things he's done. He recognizes his past actions don't represent the person that he believes himself to be deep down: a good, average human that, at the end of the day, wants nothing more to be happy. And it's Renfield's relatability that turns out to be the most memorable part of the film, as well as Nicholas Hoult's performance.

Cage's performance as Dracula is memorable also. The version of the vampiric lord in this film is quite similar to other renditions of Dracula in cinematic history, albeit a bit sillier. The Dracula in this film is also more focused on the manipulative side of him, which is very fitting for this unique storyline, but also stays true to the source material and the personality of the original character. And even though Dracula's character is memorably silly in this film, Cage still does a good job of portraying the evil that you'd expect to see in a scarier vampire film, and his interpretation of the character will still run a chill down your spine here and there.

The action scenes in this film are hilarious and entertaining. Even though Renfield is something of an underdog compared to his boss, it's still awesome to watch him eat a bug, and then turn into an ass-kicking superhuman whose moves and athleticism are often reminiscent to Neo's in The Matrix. Renfield's superhuman strength is often enough to completely annihilate humans with his fists alone, and a punch to the face of one of his enemies usually results in a hilarious and violent decapitation, with massive amounts of blood and brains exploding all over the place upon impact.

Renfield is a great Dracula spinoff film that's highly entertaining, and fans of the notorious vampire franchise will thoroughly enjoy the telling of the backstory of Dracula's loyal assistant, their falling-out, and how their relationship ends. It also surprisingly send a very positive message to the audience about coming to terms with one's past mistakes, moving on from them, and realizing that they don't necessarily make you a bad person... and that it's never too late to be a hero.