THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Universal Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2023

Based on one of the most frightening passages in a novel filled with them, The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes its story from a single chapter of Bram Stoker's seemingly—and appropriately—immortal Dracula. The book is now more than 125 years old, and if there's one positive to take away from director André Øvredal's intriguing but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to turn several pages from Stoker's novel into a feature-length narrative, it's that people are still able to come up with unique ways of adapting a story that has so long been part of the cultural consciousness.

The problem with Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz's screenplay isn't the premise, which is inherently tantalizing and really makes one hope that another team of filmmakers take another stab at it at some point in the future. It's that, for all of the possibilities of watching the crew of the doomed merchant ship lose their minds and their throats as some dark entity stalks and kills them, the whole affair is treading far too familiar ground.

That's not only in terms of the story, which is to be expected, given the novel's ubiquity in movies, on television, on the stage, and, well, just in the collective imagination of humanity. It's also and more importantly, though, in the movie's foundational tactics.

That's mainly where the disappointment lies, as the story becomes little more than a typical monster movie featuring thinly drawn characters, plenty of jump scares and fake-outs, and just enough of a momentum boost near the end of the second act to almost forgive those shortcomings. As the ship and the crew's fate draws closer and closer, the material turns toward something of a mythic showdown—not only between people and some horrific creature, but also between humanity and the embodiment of doom itself.

The screenplay places this tale in 1897, the publication year of Stoker's novel, and treats it almost as a dramatization of some real event. Opening text informs us that the Demeter washed ashore in England, in terrible disrepair and absent of a single living soul aboard the vessel. The immediate acknowledgement of Stoker's novel, obviously, gives away the game for those who might not catch on to the movie's purpose right away, while a scene of some local police finding and investigating the wreckage makes all of the text redundant. That lack of trust in the audience becomes much more apparent once the story's pattern becomes clear.

Anyway, the Russian ship has arrived in Romania to pick up a cargo shipment of multiple boxes, marked with a dragon sigil and bound for London. It's to be the final voyage of Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham), who's ready to retire to a cabin in Ireland with his grandson and ward Toby (Woody Norman). Shorthanded, the captain enlists the aid of three local sailors. One of them figures out exactly what we already know, leaving an open spot for Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a medical school graduate looking to return to England after an unpleasant professional disappointment.

There really isn't much to say about the story, which follows various members of the crew as they go about their routine business, discover a Romani stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) in one of the crates filled with soil, and soon learn that someone—or something—is leaving a trail of carnage every night. At first, the ship's dog and livestock are found with ugly bite wounds. Later, a deckhand disappears in the middle of the night, and soon enough, they start to believe that Anna, who suffers from an unknown infection of the blood, might be correct when she says some demon is the cause of the ship's increasing, bloody troubles.

The pattern, of course, is that, by day, the crew members debate what's happening and what's to be done about whatever the hell is going on, while, at night, somebody on deck hears some strange noise, wanders to investigate it, and comes face-to-face with the unnatural cause of all the problems. It's the vampire Dracula, obviously, and if the movie's scare sequences fall into an all-too familiar routine, the monster—a mixture of a digital creation and an impressively made-up Javier Botet, whose tall frame is imposing enough without all the greyish green makeup—is at least a frightening creation. Each night, it undergoes a kind of evolution, beginning as a huddled wretch that has to crawl toward its prey and ending as a powerful, flying horror with jagged, pointed teeth.

To Øvredal's credit, the director knows when to show Dracula and how much to show of the vampire to make it a threat. Meanwhile the rickety ship, with its constant creaking and the wind cutting through the silence of the stalking sequences, is exactly the sort of isolated slaughterhouse for the helpless, hopeless crew that makes the fundamental idea of the story such a promising one. The movie takes its time to establish all of that, and it's a shame, then, that not nearly as much attention is paid to the assorted characters as the limited location during that time.

The central idea of The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too good to simply write off the movie for its formulaic approach. That approach, though, is simply too formulaic to give the movie too much credit, either.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products