With the notable exception of Leigh Whannell’s deeply disturbing The Invisible Man, recent attempts to reboot Universal’s squad of classic monsters have crashed and burned like the windmill at the end of James Whale’s Frankenstein. But with Tom Cruise’s high-pitched shriek still ringing in our ears from the nosediving plane in The Mummy (the metaphor writes itself), Renfield, spun around Dracula’s bug-eating familiar, proves there’s plenty more mashing yet to be done by these monsters.
Chris McKay’s film positions itself as a direct sequel to Universal’s 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi (some Zelig/Forrest Gump-like technical wizardry replaces Dwight Frye’s Renfield with Nicolas Hoult’s in flashbacks). The hook here is that Renfield is attending support-group sessions to unpick his co-dependent relationship with his narcissistic boss. ‘I will no longer tolerate abuse, I deserve love,’ he tells Dracula, played by Nicolas Cage as a cross between Lugosi’s Count and Wild at Heart’s flamboyant Sailor. ‘You deserve only suffering,’ Dracula replies.
