Renfield

 At a support group for persons who are co-dependent and in relationships with narcissists, a girl named Kaitlyn confesses that she is helplessly in love with a monster.  This strikes a chord with Robert Montague Renfield, a handsome young man in a similar plight.  Kaitlyn is speaking metaphorically, of course; Renfield's problem is more literal -- he is the familiar for Count Dracula, of course the ultimate narcissist, a slave to the dark lord and responsible for bringing him fresh victims to devour.  (A demanding boss, Dracula wants innocent blood, demanding that poor Renfield deliver to him either a "busload of cheerleaders" or "four nuns" or both if possible. In New Orleans, where Renfield is set, four nuns are shown having coffee at a cafe and there is, indeed, a busload of nubile cheerleaders cruising around town.)  Poor Renfield, who lives on spiders and beetles and flies(he eats them like Popeye eats spinach for the super fighting powers that they induce), takes counsel with his fellow sufferers, accepts their affirmations of self-worth as his model, reads a book about how to deal with toxic narcissism and, after many picturesque and ultra-gory battles, finally finds the courage within himself to stand up to Dracula and, in fact, break the spell that vampire exercises over him.  The movie is needlessly complex, but reasonably entertaining.  And it even has a (sort of) uplifting theme.  It's garbage, of course, but witty, amusing garbage.  Nonetheless, there is a stink of desperation about the movie.  It's a bit like Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), a movie that Renfield (2023) resembles -- the picture combines some funny episodes, a pinch of satire about self-help groups and their pretensions, with high-octane, ultra-violent martial arts sequences; ultimately, it's too much, too many plates spinning in the air in the juggler's highly proficient hands, and the movie makes the audience feel a bit ashamed -- am I really so fickle, with such a short attention span, that the screenwriter and director have to expose to me a constant barrage of provocations in fear that I will abandon the show during one of the short, rapid-fire dialogue scenes interspersed between the endless (and ultimately tedious) fighting?  Of course, the high concept premise of Renfield derives from The Sopranos -- a Mafia gangster seeks psychological counseling for anxiety arising from his daily round committing beatings, murders, and extortion.  Similarly, Renfield attends the support group, seeking relief from his existence as a much-abused slave -- Dracula sometimes disembowels him as discipline for misdeeds -- serving the hideous and vicious Count.  It's a clever enough concept, but the filmmakers aren't satisfied that it is enough for their jaded audience and so they cram everything from everywhere into the movie all at once:  there's a gangland war, armies of corrupt cops,and  a plucky police officer seeking revenge for her father's assassination (he was a noble cop as well); there's a fraught mother-son relationship between the ostensible head of the gang and his monstrous mother -- she's enchanted by Dracula and the movie suggests an erotic attachment between the male and female beasts.  The plucky lady cop, played by the Korean-American rapper Awkwafina, is intrigued by the handsome Renfield, who towers above her at three times her height, and she has an intense rivalry with her sister, apparently, a FBI agent who ends being being held hostage by the Lobos gang, the crime family that provides the endless cannon fodder here required, disposable thugs, who get killed by the dozens in the movie.  All of these subplots, most of which are just mechanisms for getting more fighting on-screen, are packed willy-nilly into the movie so that the action is so fast and furious that no one gets to take a breath either on-screen or off.  The scenes involving the support group are pretty funny but they get lost in all the rampages and massacres and, by the end, even all of the poor codependents have been beheaded, eviscerated, or hacked to pieces.  (Not to worry, the gore is all disposable -- a few sips of vampire blood brings the group members back to life, assembling their disjecta membra, so that they can pursue their affirmations and wretched, abusive relationships.)

I watched the whole movie and found it diverting in a trivial and meaningless way.  Renfield is worth watching because of Nicholas Cage who plays Dracula.  He gets to howl at the moon and intone such plummy lines as "I am the dark poetry in the human heart."  He's convincingly grotesque and savage and, of course, whenever Cage is onscreen the movie is compelling.  (But the part is not particularly well-written and simply consists of dialogue recycled from other vampire movies.)  The comedy is reasonably effective, although truth to tell, I think What We Do in the Dark, the TV vampire show by Jemaine Clement and Tahiki Waiti, is funnier, better made, and less desperate to drag you kicking and screaming into its embrace.  Renfield's filmmaking is showy and the camerawork and fight-choreography is impressive -- you get to see Renfield, fueled to super-powers by eating bugs, rip off a guy's arms at the shoulder, club down about six adversaries with the bleeding limbs. and, then, pin two minions to the wall by hurling the severed arms, sharp bone first, like lances into his foes.  Awkwafina is good as the doughty cop, apparently the sole police officer who not corrupt, in the New Orleans force.  (They have the discouraging motto  Don't solve the crime until overtime on the wall of the station house.)  The role of her sister is underwritten to the point of being almost invisible -- there's a notional relationship between the siblings that we are supposed to flesh-out on the basis of a hundred other TV shows and movies depicting something similar.  The film's slogans seem to be "Believe in Yourself" and "You are worthy to be loved" -- probably good messages although obscured by all the spurting blood and bodies blown into webs of spinning gore.  Of course, the reason a movie like this gets made, diverting the attention of a dozen Hollywood Chekhovs and Ibsens from worthier projects, is that I am willing to spend a weekend night watching it.  So, in the end, I can't be too critical about a film that I thought was okay since I'm the intended audience.  Without me, and legion of others, a picture like this wouldn't be made.