Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Adrian Martinez, and Shohreh Aghdashloo

Directed by Chris McKay

Universal, out now

Dracula and his servant Renfield arrive in contemporary New Orleans…

Renfield is a huge amount of fun. It’s also extremely gory in a cartoonishly violent kind of way where no excuse to chop someone in half or tear their arms off is missed.

By and large it knows exactly what it wants to be and delivers a madcap action adventure featuring Dracula and his familiar Renfield, played by Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult respectively. Supported by the ever more impressive Awkwafina, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Ben Schwartz the film is a neat dovetailing of Dracula’s story with something far more contemporary – a gangster movie.

As far as the plot goes, it’s really about Renfield’s slow escape from Dracula’s overweening, unhinged and abusive ownership. His journey is sparked by a chance meeting with Awkwafina’s Rebecca, a pure of heart hero surrounded by jokers, clowns and the corrupt.

The tone is never far from absurd, swallowing whole the truth that Dracula in the modern day is fighting to stay relevant as much as he is out of direct sunlight. This works perfectly because by leaning into the idea that Dracula being real is a ridiculous nonsense, the film steers a joyous path through massacres, bizarre side characters and a town in which it appears every single cop is corrupt bar one and somehow no one’s ever actually noticed; not even the office of FBI agents who share a floor in the police precinct.

This absurdist tone is matched by a script which delivers numerous one liners and physical moments that are laugh out loud funny as much as they are grizzly. It is this match of horror and humour that keeps the film moving.

However, there is something a little more serious underneath and that’s how bad relationships can ruin us, can make us choose destructive paths and how, perhaps, we can escape from them only when we’re ready ourselves.

All of this is understandable when you note the writers, Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman, come to this film having written Rick and Morty, Invincible and The Walking Dead. They make an interesting pairing – getting the best out of Cage without him being entirely off the rails and having Hoult channel Ben Whishaw’s Paddington Bear in his delivery of the emotionally-awakened Renfield.

The film has few real moving parts – driven mostly by the initial choices each character makes with little else considered in their motivation or journeys. However, given what it is, that’s not a problem and at a whisker over ninety minutes, it doesn’t stay long enough for its simplicity to become a problem.

Verdict: Renfield is gory, funny, deeply absurd and very entertaining.

Rating? 8 familiars out of 10.

Stewart Hotston