I Just Saw

Vampires have had a long and storied history in fiction, but in recent years the Dracula mythos in particular has been used to explore the dynamics of relationships between these creatures of the night and those whose lives they touch. Since the Dracula story was always in part a metaphor for sexual predation, it’s perhaps no surprise that a comedy’s come along that addresses narcissism, co-dependency, and other support group lingo as applied to everyone’s favourite problematic aristocrat and his relationship with his loyal toady, Robert Montague Renfield.

Played respectively by Nics Cage and Hoult, Dracula and Renfield wind up in present-day New Orleans after more than a hundred years of Renfield supplying Dracula with human victims. (The film seems to have decided to have the events of Bram Stoker’s novel occur after World War I, as opposed to its original late Victorian setting. Also no Jonathan and Mina Harker, unless I missed something.)

But Renfield’s life of slavish codependency is telling on him. He starts visiting a support group for survivors of abusive relationships and gets involved with a cop, Rebecca (Awkwafina). She’s hunting the mobster (Ben Schwartz) whose family, led by a vicious matriarch (Shohreh Aghdashloo), are responsible for her father’s death.

The film is intended as a direct sequel to 1931’s Dracula, a black-and-white clip from which is cleverly used to introduce Hoult’s Renfield. Hoult is the best thing about the film from a story engagement perspective. He brings a woundedness and vulnerability to Renfield that’s genuinely touching at times. What he does here is harder than it might seem. He has to walk a fine line between the pathetic nature of Renfield and the like-ability required to carry a comedy.

Nicolas Cage does his usual thing, though with a little more moderation than usual, perhaps because he’s more intent on creating a character here. He’s good, giving his performance the right balance of camp and menace. The jokes are often funny and the gore is amusingly OTT. I wouldn’t really describe this as a horror film so much as an action comedy with some genre elements, but the gore is actually fun and creative if you appreciate that sort of thing.

The biggest problem with the film is that the crime plot involving Rebecca and the New Orleans mob is completely artificial and basically on a sitcom level. The mother/son mobster team are utterly worthless characters, barely rising to the level of caricature. It’s frustrating that action comedies like this still feel a need to tack on useless crime plots about stool pigeons and collusion. There were times during the cop scenes where it seemed like I was watching a low-rent TV show.

New Orleans is a storied city and was presumably chosen for its connection with vampires. (Poppy Z Brite made it a home for his bloodsuckers before Stephanie Meyer took them to Washington.) Yet it isn’t exploited at all in the cinematography, which is pretty straightforward.

It feels like there’s a more transgressive comedy hiding in the margins of Renfield. For example, what if there was a homosexual element to Renfield’s attachment to Dracula? That would explain what motivated him to stick with Dracula, which is left very vague in the script. It makes a point of saying that Renfield’s enslavement was partly his choice, but doesn’t really clarify what it was about being Dracula’s slave forever and anon that he found attractive.

But if he was a confused gay man in the post-WWI era, and Dracula preyed on this? Or what if Renfield was straight but bad with women, and tempted by Dracula’s promise of imparting his seductive powers?

The film doesn’t seem all that interested in developing story and motivation past a certain point, which is a shame. Renfield is still a funny take on vampire lore, however, and worth watching just for Hoult and Cage’s performances, as well as all that gooey gore.