The Last Voyage of the Demeter
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
There’s a part of me that honestly loves how gonzo this movie feels. The exaggerated camera angles, the sound effects, the shadows, and the overall aesthetic of director André Øvredal’s adaptation of one of the chapters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As a cinematic vision, it is a feast. But the screenplay doesn’t quite know how it wants to approach this doomed voyage at sea, and as a result, Øvredal’s film feels more overwrought than it probably should. Regardless, I think I enjoyed this in its own crazy way.
I understand some of the choices that screenwriters Bragi F. Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz make as they adapt one of the most chilling chapters of Stoker’s story. Dracula is going to London. He has 50 crates of the damned Earth of his homeland sent on a ship, the Demeter, which is unaware what they are carrying. He has stowed away in one of the crates. When the ship gets to London, the crew is gone; only Dracula remains. The chapter is told from the perspective of the captain’s log, found by authorities when the ship crashes on the rocks. You can see why someone would think this is a great idea for a film- it has a lot of potential.
This portion of Stoker’s narrative makes a lot of sense as being treated as it’s own story within a story, and the writers do a great job of filling in the blanks of what’s missing around this part of the story. Where they struggle, however, is how to fit this within a particular narrative structure beyond that of the captain’s log. Essentially, this is a story primed for the structure of a slasher narrative, and yes, there are beats of this movie that hue towards the “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween” models. Or, you could frame it as a film building to a final showdown like “Predator”- one of my favorite slasher-adjacent films of all-time. Or, you could goose the tension of these characters in an isolated place with a creature a la “Alien” and “The Thing.” All of these would be great, but part of the problem “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” has is that it doesn’t lean into one, and rather, tries to play to all of them. It also doesn’t have anything thematically it wants to say. The nominal main character, a doctor named Clemons (played by Corey Hawkins), says that- for him- his wish is for the world to make sense, and while the film does try to bring the discrimination he experiences as a Black man into the story, it honestly doesn’t fit into the situation they’re in now, as the creature continues its attacks of the crew. More compelling a main character is Anna, played by Aisling Franciosi, a stowaway from Romania who’s familiar with the legends of Dracula. With Clemons, the writers are trying at their own Van Helsing- and Hawkins is up for the task- but honestly, Anna should be the character this film builds up to in the end to be her vs. Dracula, not only does Franciosi give the character depth with her physical acting, she is also the one that knows about Dracula. And with the perception of women being bad luck on boats, there’s a lot of meat her and the rest of the cast could have played with.
If I’m disappointed with the film from a storytelling standpoint, I love what this film is about as a cinematic experience. Øvredal is all about bravado and giving us a feast for the senses with how he and cinematographer Tom Stern shoots the production design by Edward Thomas. This film feels very old-fashioned in how it’s designed and shot, and Bear McCreary’s score is all about heightening the sense of dread on this voyage. From a visual standpoint, I’d put this up with “Crimson Peak” as one of my favorite horror films to simply watch and listen to. Where the film fails, however, is where it could have been the easiest to succeed; Stoker gave the filmmakers a great narrative to adapt. But being able to bring something authentic to that narrative that grabs us is where this film falters.
