‘Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Review: Strange Cargo
"The Last Voyage of the Demeter" offers a few shudders and eye-catching creature effects, but sinks on its way to shore.
Based on a single, gripping chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the much less gripping horror adaptation The Last Voyage of the Demeter (★★☆☆☆) comes with a foregone conclusion whether you’ve read the book or not.
Sailing in the summer of 1897 from the Hungarian port of Varna on a scheduled month-long voyage to Whitby, England, the Demeter is carrying among its cargo “private crates bound for London.” At least one of those crates contains, unbeknownst to the ship’s captain and crew, a creature of ancient lineage, what Dr. Van Helsing in the book calls the nosferatu, the undead.
And, since nearly 300 pages of Stoker’s story follow that one chapter, we know the creature doesn’t die on the Demeter. The monster, known in its human form as Count Dracula, will get off that boat in England. But what of the crew?
The film, directed by Norwegian horror-fantasy specialist André Øvredal (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) manages a few surprises on its way to Whitby, but not enough to keep an audience guessing. There’s really just enough to keep an audience engaged, as the mysterious presence on board the ship methodically decimates the crew one by one, night by night.
The premise promises a lean, self-contained stalk-and-scare horror story, Alien on a three-mast schooner, but Øvredal doesn’t seem interested in planting the seeds of suspense. So where the tension should build, it plods, where the action should race, it sort of skips ahead to whatever might be considered that scene’s money shot.
Usually that involves a jump cut or camera pan to the creature, performed in genuinely frightening makeup by Spanish actor Javier Botet. There’s not much teasing here — after a few spare glimpses of the pale, bony figure haunting the decks, we finally witness the creature take its first human victim.
From that point, Øvredal shows off the creature in various forms throughout, to the audience if not to the ship’s crew, who only gradually realize they’re stuck in a doom spiral that none might survive. Therein lies some suspense — will any of them escape? In the book, none do, to anyone’s knowledge.
Diverging from the book, the movie, written by Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room) and Zak Olkewicz (Bullet Train), places a young female stowaway, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) on board, along with a precocious kid, Toby (Woody Norman), grandson of haggard but decent Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham).
The ship’s doctor, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), an educated Black man returning to England, stands out among the mostly Eastern European crew for other reasons that the script deals with ham-handedly, although with very obviously good intentions.
As the crewman who takes the lead in hunting down this demon hiding in the shadows, Hawkins gives a solid performance — as do Cunningham and Norman, and David Dastmalchian as the ship’s skeptical first mate, Wojchek. Still, there’s little he can do with Clemens’ “I was the first Black doctor to graduate from Cambridge and still couldn’t get hired anywhere but in Transylvania” speech to avoid sounding like a sudden interruption from PBS.
The moment feels shoved into the movie, not because we don’t support the sentiment of rounding out the character, and not because the matter of race has no impact on the story — it does. The problem lies in the leaden writing, which Hawkins can do only so much to help, and the ill-timed placement of the speech within the narrative.
In general, The Demeter feels dead of pace, roused into action only by the prospect of playing with its spindly, monstrous iteration of Dracula, who causes plenty of bloody, throat-slashing damage. Øvredal tends to focus on the gory, CGI-assisted results rather than the precious details of setting up the creature’s speedy bursts of action. The filmmakers do go to the trouble of setting up a sequel, but our interest might be dead in the water.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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