The Demeter is a small sailing ship carrying private cargo from eastern Europe to England.
As the voyage gets underway, the crew - including new ship’s doctor Clemons (Corey Hawkins) - begin to notice strange occurrences.
Livestock are butchered, crew go missing and a young woman (Aisling Franciosi) is discovered in one of the mysterious crates, with strange bite wounds on her body…
This movie has been in the works for years - I first heard of it about a decade ago, when Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) was attached to the project.
Based on one of the most memorable passages in Bram Stoker’s original novel, one can see the appeal of turning it into a film. You have the claustrophobic confines of an old sailing ship and one of the most iconic horror monsters prowling its recesses. It is an evocative combination.
Previous adaptations of Dracula either cut the sequence out, or shown an abbreviated version of it.
Rather than hide its origins or its villain, Voyage takes the Titanic route for its story:
After starting with the ship’s eventual fate on the rocks off Whitby, this film flashes back to the beginning of the titular voyage.
With even new viewers primed with some awareness of the story, the emphasis is placed on using that knowledge for suspense.
The production values are good, the cast are committed, and the filmmakers make a decent stab at laying out the ship’s geography.
But there is an underlying issue with Voyage that plagues the movie as much as its vampiric antagonist: there is no story here.
Frankly, the filmmakers here should have taken note of how this scene is portrayed in previous films of Dracula. The reason other films have deleted this scene is because it is not necessary. And in the novel, it is a brief, evocative bridge between the different parts of the story.
With Dracula as an inevitable threat - who, for story purposes, must survive the climax - the film tries to split the difference between being a nautical version of Alien’s bug hunt, and a disaster movie, with Hawkins’ and Franciosi’s characters trying to survive the unstoppable menace.
To its credit, the film tries to give Hawkins’ Clemons an arc, as a rational man forced to accept the chaos of the world around him, but it never quite comes off.
The film’s fidelity to its source feels defeating - while the ending teases a franchise, I was disappointed that the filmmakers did not show a more liberal attitude to their adaptation, and use the scenario as a launchpad for an original story.
Dracula himself, played by Javier Botet, is a bit of a whiff.
Evoking Count Orlac in Nosferatu, this emaciated, bald and toothy conception is not particularly original, but I found myself more frustrated by how much we could see him throughout the movie. Maybe this is the effect of catching a trailer before another movie which revealed his appearance, but I was shocked at how many early scenes showed Vlad, especially his face.
Maybe because of the character’s inherent familiarity, the throwback design, how the filmmakers present him onscreen, or a combination of all three, this Dracula is never that scary.
Ultimately, The Last Voyage of the Demeter’s chief selling point - its roots in the original Dracula story - is its greatest weakness. It is ultimately a prequel - and like most prequels, it covers ground that was not necessary.
This is a handsomely mounted production - but it never fully justifies its existence. Not a bad movie, but a hollow, unsatisfying one.
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