The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they’re earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel–not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the “Captain’s Log” portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula’s stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau’s Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film’s character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal’s Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

The film opens on a Romanian dock as first officer Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) tries filling a few holes in the ship’s crew before setting sail. Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) promises a share of the bonus offered by a mysterious benefactor interested in the rapid delivery of his shipping containers, and so a collection of hands, including Cambridge-educated doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins), throws in–some for the promise of wealth, others for the chance at a new beginning where, say, a Black man might be allowed to do what he was trained to do. Not long into the voyage, a stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) is found amongst the dirt of a broken crate, nearly dead from loss of blood but revived under the ministrations of Clemens. She warns that a fiend that has terrorized her village for generations is aboard the Demeter, though her warnings come too late to do anyone much good. Clemens and Anna are bound by more than the blood transfusion he gives her: a legacy of colonialism has cast them both in subservient positions beneath a hereditary ruling class. They are lower even than the merchant class to which the Captain and his mates belong. Not much more is made of this, although the fact they are being predated upon by royalty–a Count! (and a member, it goes without saying, of the land-owning gentry)–is by itself a little gristle on this well-gnawed bone.

There are jump scares, too (the most effective one cribbed from Neil Marshall’s The Descent), some decent gore and creature effects, and there’s enough of the feeling of a wet, decayed gothic castle to evoke the Hammer Films tradition to which The Last Voyage of the Demeter owes its approach. I miss the lurid sexiness, however–the Hammer Draculas were especially rife with it. Øvredal’s picture is mainly committed to the grime and the long blue shadows, the claustrophobia of a long trip over deadly waters, where the outcome has been predetermined by more than a century of popular awareness. Something is also wanting in a film about the hidden savagery of the ruling class where we never glimpse the mask of civility, but alas. Ultimately, my complaints about The Last Voyage of the Demeter have more to do with my expectations of a Dracula film than with any of its deficiencies as a period spam-in-a-cabin/creature feature. As such, it’s crackerjack if never groundbreaking, scary if never truly frightening, tragic if never heartbreaking. It’s fleet and professional, yet lacking in enough distinction for me to forget the source of its best gags (consider how it borrows the spontaneous-combustion stings from Let the Right One In, for instance, or the undead and discoloured child corpse from Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot). I do wonder what Øvredal would have made of a Norse monster rather than one born of a British imagination. For what it is, it’s good enough.