Renfield Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

1. The Creative Visuals

Renfield's $65 million budget is certainly on the higher end of what you would expect from a modest mid-budget genre film, but it does at least shine in the visual department - editing issues excepted.

In fact, Renfield might peak on an aesthetic level in its opening two minutes, when director McKay makes the extremely shrewd decision to digitally superimpose Cage and Hoult into footage from the 1931 Bela Lugosi-starring Dracula film.

Beyond that, it's clear that a ton of work went into the film's moody, operatic lighting, and especially the frankly Oscar-worthy makeup applied to Nicolas Cage in the early going, when Dracula is in various stages of hilariously disgusting decrepitude.

It's certainly a film that doesn't want for effort on the production side, and while hardly a movie that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible - John Wick: Chapter 4 it ain't - it's a handsomely mounted piece of work all the same.