Director: André Øvredal
Writers: Bragi Schut Jr & Zak Olkewicz
Stars: Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, Javier Botet
Synopsis: A crew sailing from Carpathia to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.
*This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.*
“It’s Dracula on a boat.” “It’s like Alien, but with Dracula.” You don’t need to say anything else. I’m here. No matter how terrible the title is. I will see that in a heartbeat. What an incredible concept based on The Ship’s Log from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Especially after the maligned Renfield, it certainly sounds like it could reignite interest in Dracula after Universal failed to readapt the tale in 2014 with Dracula Untold. Not only that, but it stars Corey Hawkins as the lead, one of the best up-and-coming actors working today, and the music is composed by Bear McCreary, fresh from his incredible work in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power? Shut up and take my money!
I was ready to watch The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Yes, it’s a bad title. Possibly the worst of the year. But if the film is good, I can easily forgive a flimsy title. And while it’s welcomed in the realm of horror to have a lean and mean premise and a good lead performance from Corey Hawkins, the film itself is one of the dullest horror movies I’ve seen in a very long time and one of the most disappointing outings from a studio I’ve seen all year. It’s even worse when the film starts quite decent, beautifully shot, and immediately hits the audience with the eeriest possible atmosphere as we see the remains of the Demeter before it flashes back to four weeks before this scene. Then it grinds to a halt and never picks up.
The movie follows the Demeter’s titular last voyage, as the shipmates discover that a cargo they’ve been carrying has been killing off crew members one by one. First, it killed all of the animals on board. Then it starts picking up some of the B-crew members until the middle section arrives, and one major character has to die for the stakes to be elevated before its climax. All of this has been hampered to death in so many horror movies time and again. Still, I will applaud director André Øvredal for doing something that no one else would’ve ever done with one of the most shocking midpoint swings I’ve seen since the death of Maria Hill in Secret Invasion. Of course, that’s apples and oranges, but it did catch me off guard and, quite frankly, shocked the living hell out of me.
But that’s the only exciting scene The Last Voyage of the Demeter offers. Instead of creating an atmosphere of pure dread as they progressively discover that this boat is harboring the blood-sucking Dracula (Javier Botet), the movie would rather craft endless murky sequences filled with jumpscares and gotcha! moments. One character looks at the sea with his monocular, panning slowly until BOO! Dracula appears before him and…disappears as he takes his eye off. Next, he talks to Clemens (Hawkins), lightning strikes, and, of course, Dracula is right behind him. All of it, from how Øvredal frames these sequences, have been plucked straight out of other horror films, and there’s no eye for the original or the exciting here.
It would rather play it safe with the “Dracula on a boat” concept than elevate it and produce the next horror cult classic. And even the scenes where Dracula kills people are poorly constructed. It doesn’t help that none of the night sequences (where most of the movie takes place) are poorly lit and have barely any energy to sustain most of the runtime. It’s either poorly lit and haphazardly shot, or with lighting hitting the frames in a strobe-light effect, audiences become overwhelmed by its power. Botet’s practical performance of Dracula, which is genuinely terrifying, gets hampered by what looks like unfinished CGI.
It doesn’t look scary or finished when Dracula flies for the first time. The CGI completely bogs down Botet’s portrayal of the character. It must have been fun playing an on-screen iteration of the character we hadn’t seen since F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (until Robert Eggers releases his version of Murnau’s film next year). Yet, his performance can’t be seen amidst the sea of computer-generated effects he is masked with. Botet has brought to life some of the scariest creatures in modern-day horror cinema. Yet, his talents are completely wasted here, especially in its final act, in which Dracula arrives at the full extent of his on-screen powers without much excitement generated from its aesthetics and acting. We can always count on Bear McCreary to accompany the film with a wonderful score, but most of the acting here is surprisingly forgettable.
Hawkins is the best part of the movie as its moral center, always trying to justify what’s going on with reason and scientific rigor. Still, everyone else is a distinct cliché: Liam Cunningham as the washed-up captain who refuses to believe a supernatural entity is here, Aisling Franciosi has a personal vendetta against Dracula and is the only one who knows how to defeat it, and David Dastmalchian teeters the line between rationality and irrationality. And then you’ve got the kid, played here by Cobweb’s Woody Norman (his horror streak is not very good!). Of course, the kid will get into serious trouble, and Hawkins’ character will act as its father figure, protecting him at all costs when his grandfather (the captain) can’t. All of these character arcs, even Hawkins, don’t add anything new to the table and bloat what could’ve otherwise been a lean 85-90-minute affair to two hours, spending way too much time building storylines with very little payoff near the end, instead of hammering its gothic aesthetic with modern-day gore sensibilities, which is what an “Alien but Dracula” movie should’ve been in the first place.
As a result, The Last Voyage of the Demeter fails to deliver on its core premise. Yes, Dracula is on a boat…but did it have to be this boring? After the incredible success of RackaRacka’s Talk To Me, Hollywood studios need to realize that most moviegoers are turning down mainstream horror and are instead supporting auteur-driven (and independent) horror films that will not only scare the living hell out of you but consistently take risks in its plot structure and aesthetics. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is not only extremely dull to look at, but its story re-treads so many beats that have already been done far too many times in studio-driven horror. It’s time for the genre to reinvent itself before it grows even more stale than current studio offerings.
