The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The ship Demeter transports cargo, which comes from Transylvania and is bound for London, it is the vessel on which Bram Stoker’s Dracula travels. The 16-page part (in my edition) that chronicles this ill-fated journey the seventh chapter of the book contains some of the most vivid writing in a novel not otherwise known for its elegance, but it’s really just a detour. It shows how Dracula got from A to B. These few nights are just a long box to be checked off with an “and then ” or ignored altogether, as they generally are when this story is filmed. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is a feature length imagining of those nights.
I was not initially sold on the idea of this movie. This would be a film where practically every audience member would not only know exactly what the supernatural force at the center of the story is before the Universal logo hits the screen, but unless there was going to be some really wild variation from one of the best known narratives in popular culture know exactly how things were going to play out beat by beat. To me, it looked like another desperate shot by Universal to bring Dracula back into modern public consciousness following failed reboots like “Dracula Untold” and that recent Renfield thing that thankfully never happened, maybe it still is! But if so, I can’t pretend I didn’t have a good time watching.
The film takes place in 1897 at the time when the Demeter is supposed to leave Transylvania for London, commanded by Captain Elliot. But before they start their journey there are some recruits from amongst the locals who become scared and refuse to go further having realized that large crates marked for Carfax Abbey in London have been delivered by an unknown person. Clemens, a doctor from England, signs on as ship’s doctor in order to get home, his medical skills come into play when one of these boxes accidentally opens up revealing a stowaway with some mysterious illness that necessitates multiple blood transfusions.
Afterward, weird events start occurring on board: all livestock gets killed along with Toby’s dog during one bloody night, sailors report seeing or hearing strange things during their watch shifts at night while even shiprats seem to have disappeared thus the immortal phrase “A boat without rats against nature”. Crew members begin vanishing so those remaining become more paranoid especially after Anna, the still unconscious stowaway (as we learn her name is), wakes up and tells them that yes indeed they’ve got Nosferatu (to quote Mel Brooks). Dracula keeps feeding off people throughout until only few survivors remain who desperately try figuring out means of stopping him before reaching London.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter was directed by André Øvredal whose works include such interesting horror films as “Trollhunter”, “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” or underrated “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”. This time he wants to find out how can he tell a story where every viewer will know what is going to happen next all along. And primarily through paying much attention on visual side, creating gloomy and haunted atmosphere even during daytime scenes which is both strangely beautiful and simply creepy. In recent times this has been one of better-looking horror movies. Dracula’s cat and mouse pursuits against crew members are staged in some sort of sea based “Alien” form, Øvredal stretches nerves before nasty things occur as much as possible.
And bear in mind that part of this movie can be treated quite nastily shown visualization of Dracula here is enormously ugly and evil, killing is rather bloody for getting “R” rating only and what’s more even the character who should survive through all this does not avoid but suffers from it several times. With good performances especially by genre MVP Dastmalchian, Franciosi (so strong in “The Nightingale”) or Botet, emotions are raised enough to make up for predictable ending.
There are two points where the film stumbles a bit. Although Øvredal’s choice to use a relatively slow and measured pace in order to generate suspense is mostly effective and certainly preferable to the quick cut approach many others would have taken, some scenes here run on too long for their own good. Also, the movie Spoiler Alert! indulges in one of the most annoying tropes of contemporary horror cinema, a final scene that exists solely to set up future movies if this one does well at the box office.
And yet, everything else about it works well enough that these flaws don’t hurt too much. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” may not become a classic in Dracula lore alongside Terence Fisher’s Hammer production “Horror of Dracula,” Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” or Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula.” But it is an intelligent, well made, and frequently genuinely creepy retelling of the story that should satisfy both hardcore genre fans and general audiences alike.
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