Renfield - screen casualisation of extreme violence feels so wrong right now

Another week, another slab of perfectly watchable nonsense as Dracula gets the 21st century treatment in a tale of escape and redemption.

Nicolas Cage is terrific as the blood-slurping fiend, the poet of the darkness within all our souls, as he likes to remind us. But this is Renfield’s tale, the story of the dodgy lawyer who went to do a land deal with the Prince of Darkness more than a century ago and ended up shackled to him for all eternity as his servant. Renfield is the guy forced to source fresh corpses for Dracula, and not just any corpses. Dracula is quite specific – nuns and cheerleaders are his preference. Except that this is the present day and this is America, and Renfield is starting to rebel, fuelled by the self-help classes he is going along to for people with co-dependency issues, ie people who are in toxic relationships – though not quite as toxic as the one that Renfield can’t quite bring himself to share. But he’s arming himself with all the mantras. He’s enough. He wants to be his own master. Etc etc. His trouble is that disentangling himself from Dracula was never going to be a walk in the park. Fortunately, though, he finds himself an unexpected ally in the shape of police officer Rebecca (Awkwafina), a woman determined to bring down the crime family who killed her hero, her dad, also a cop. Her big obstacle is that the police are completely in cahoots with the baddies in this town.

In Renfield, though, she finds a kindred spirit and they join together in a mission to free themselves from their oppressors. It’s relentlessly gory stuff, endless limbs and heads ripped off, blood squirting absolutely everywhere and the bodies piling up grimly. There is a casualness to the extreme violence which is cartoonish but also just a little bit depressing. With the weekend bringing yet another mass shooting in the States, you can’t help wondering what this stuff does to people. There’s certainly never any sense that the people being killed so remorselessly are actually people. The more you think about it, the bleaker it gets. But as a film it’s entertaining stuff – though it maybe seems a little longer than its 93 minutes. It doesn’t obviously set itself up for a sequel, but it’s bound to be in everyone’s minds… though the virtually empty cinema we were sitting in won’t have offered terribly much encouragement to anyone.

There’s good fun, though, with Cage as Dracula. He’s clearly and quite rightly taking nothing terribly seriously. He’s having a blast, in fact. And there is fun too in the interaction between Rebecca, an interesting character fighting a world of corruption, and Renfield, a strange mix of indecision and resolve, brought to life by Nicholas Hoult who made his name as the boy in About A Boy 21 years ago opposite Hugh Grant – and embodying now so much of Grant 21 years ago in his mix of foppishness, good looks and hesitancy. He’s certainly riffing on all the Grant mannerisms here – and does so to good effect.