‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Is a Vampire ‘Master and Commander’
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OK, class, get out your copies of Dracula and open them to Chapter Seven. Now, skim past the newspaper clipping from the Dailygraph that Mina Murray has pasted into her journal, the one about the storm off the coast of Whitby, and go directly to the part listed as “Log of the ‘Demeter.” You’ll see that Bram Stoker has replicated what appears to be a captain’s diary, detailing the curious goings-on of a voyage from the Bulgarian town of Varna to London; it’s one of the more clever epistolary tricks the author trots out in his 1897 novel. A Russian seafaring vessel, the Demeter shipped out of port on what promised to be a routine trip across the Mediterranean Sea. The crew, however, is spooked. They think they’ve seen a strange man wandering the deck in the wee small hours. It will not end well.
It’s a minor detour in Dracula, just a transitory bit of business designed to get the bloodsucker from Eastern Europe to England so he can get his teeth into Mina’s neck. In the book, it’s less than a third of a chapter. In most movies based on Stoker’s novel, official and unofficial, the sequence runs shorter than your average trailer. In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, it’s the whole bloodsucking enchilada. The idea of taking a segment from the grandfather of all vampire tales, that falls somewhere between a tangent and a trivia-question answer, then turning it into a two-hour movie is one of the more curious bits of intellectual-property raiding in recent memory. No one was exactly clamoring for a full-blown deep dive into Dracula’s snack-and-nap sea cruise, or even “Master and Commander, but make it gothic and terrifying.” Yet here we are.
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If those descriptions above just got your jugular vein all aflutter, however, this elaborate mix of old-school schooner drama and strictly-for-the-hardcore-Drac-heads fan service is most certainly for you. To its credit, The Last Voyage of the Demeter turns its assignment into an opportunity to create the sort of nautical period piece that rarely gets the chance to set sail these days. You can practically smell the scallywags and salty dogs who make up the crew, from the gruff captain (Game of Thrones‘ Liam Cunningham) who’s set to retire once he gets to Londontown to the first mate (David Dastmalchian) with the get-moose-and-squirrel accent to the Bible-quoting cook (Jon Jon Briones). There’s a creak to the ship’s wood and a fwap to the masts during a gale wind that will cause those who’ve devoured Sunday afternoon screenings of vintage seafaring epics to reflexively drool.
Besides the well-tested sailors, there are a few extra guests onboard this ill-fated trip. Like Dr. Clemens (Corey Hawkins), the Cambridge-educated physician who wants to return to England and filled a last-minute vacancy. And Clare (The Nightingale‘s Aisling Franciosi), a stowaway from a small Bulgarian village who appears to have some sort of blood infection; Clemens goes to great pains to give her transfusions and save her life. And that shadowy figure, which those on the night watch catch glimpses of. Whether this person is connected to the sudden slaughter of all the livestock onboard, or the mysterious disappearances of several able-bodied seamen, is anyone’s guess. All the Demeter’s crew know is that some person of aristocratic bearing — perhaps a count — paid for a lot of cargo to be shipped to Britain; that the dragon insignia slapped on those boxes tended to freak out the locals; and something very shady is happening once the sun goes down.
The Dracula (Javier Botet) that eventually makes his presence known is not of the suave, Euro-sophisticated Lugosi type but the bald, clawed, fang-forward creature of the night you associate with Salem’s Lot and Nosferatu. In fact, Demeter owes its biggest debt to F.W. Murnau’s perpetually eerie 1922 silent movie, in both its channeling of that classic’s indelible sequence aboard a ship and its determination to make Max Schreck’s bug-eyed bloodsucker look like a matinee idol by comparison. You wonder if director André Øvredal, his below-the-line collaborators, and the cast started each day on set by staring intently at this image for 30 minutes and then going, “Right, so like, let’s just aim for that.” The Norwegian filmmaker behind Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe clearly has reverence for the source material, scant as it is, and knows his way around what’s essentially a floating haunted house. He also isn’t afraid to get cruel when he needs to, which lends an edge to scenes like the ship’s resident kid (Woody Norman) being hunted by both a “turned” sailor and a bat-winged monstrosity. No one’s safe.
If The Last Voyage of the Demeter feels like you’re watching some sort of dare — “I dare you to take these three pages and make a movie out of them!” — or a footnote etched with stretch marks from being pulled as far as it can go into action-horror territory, that’s because it’s 2023 and even the dust in the I.P. corners are fair game. Will those who find the mustiest pieces of horror-lit lore dig this more than those just pining for a halfway decent jump scare? Probably. Will others mining for something deeper find that references to racial prejudice circa the late 19th century feel a little too tossed away, or the “well, it could be a franchise” ending too ambitious? Maybe. Will moviegoers from all walks of life have to endure lines like, “A boat without rats… such a thing is against nature!”, delivered in the campiest way imaginable? One hundred percent most definitely yes.
But this is also the type of project that manages to lift itself up above the fray by sheer will and chops, not to mention its determination to scratch a throwback-genre itch. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a threadbare high-concept story given the high-thread-count treatment — a lovely piece of luxury pulp. It’s also the creepiest and classiest bit of late-summer counterprogramming you’re likely to find, which may say more about our current landscape of cinematic pleasures than the movie itself.
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