This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.There is a terrifying force at the center of director André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It isn’t the inherent perils of being trapped on a boat with no help to be found in the miles and miles of open sea that surround you. It doesn’t even come from the remarkable physicality of creature actor legend Javier Botet who takes on the role of Dracula himself. Even with all its promise, it is something even more horrifying which comes to define the experience: banality. It is a banality that saps the life out of the nightmarish brutality lurking beneath and leaves its cast stranded with little to guide them. They do their absolute best, with Corey Hawkins especially bringing gravitas to a long overdue leading role, and there is a commendable amount of darkness that the film doesn’t shy away from. However, the more it is held up to the light, the more it begins to burn and crumble before you. There are thrills to be found, but much of the film is made unnecessarily adrift as it careens to its ultimate doom.

Expanding on a single chapter of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, the film begins in proper with a boat loading up with mysterious cargo and looking for additional hands for the upcoming voyage. There is an almost comical element to how frequently the film flags foreboding signs, with side character after side character practically shouting that evil is about to be brought aboard the ship, bluntly foretelling not just the dangers that will consume the story once it sets out but also the often dull repetition in how it explores this. What initially holds this beginning together is the actors who, without ever overplaying their parts, feel dynamic in a way the film itself is not. The observant doctor Clemens (Hawkins) is initially passed over despite his clear qualifications though ultimately proves his poise under pressure when he saves a young boy from being crushed. His protection of Toby, played by Woody Norman of the lovely 2021 film C’mon C’mon, endears him to Captain Eliot, played by a wonderfully gruff Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones, and gets him passage. This comes despite the initial objections of Eliot’s successor Wojcheck, played by the always delightful David Dastmalchian of this year’s The Boogeyman and the upcoming Late Night with the Devil, who still can’t go against his Captain. With the stage sufficiently set, the film begins its halting journey into a horror whose greatest reveal is how sporadic and oddly sluggish it all is the longer it goes on.

‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Is Best When Dracula Gets to Be a Little Freak
Image via Universal

After being introduced to a few other characters, most of whom will fade into the background until being served up to Dracula, the film begins to establish some of its rules. Many of these will be rather basic to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with vampires and the film relies on its setting to provide a bit of a twist on the formula. We get beat over the head with the reminder that all the characters can communicate via banging on the ship itself and that the echo will be heard throughout its bones. When Dracula begins to use this information to mess with them, turning it into the most deadly game of knock-knock ever, the film begins to find something more fun to sink its teeth into. It is not just the kills, which are appropriately gruesome even if they are oddly light in tension, but the more playful undercurrent operating underneath it. Dracula is not a mindless monster and seeing him toy with his food is dark fun.

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When the vampire takes on a mocking tone right before mercilessly dispatching the members of the crew, we get a glimpse of what could have been a more biting experience. Unfortunately, the film just isn’t all that genuinely scary and often falls back on some tired tricks to provide an unconvincing illusion of being so. One moment where a character grabs another’s shoulder is the type of “jump scare” that feels like it has largely fallen out of use and for good reason. Where other masterful recent horror films challenge the visual grammar of how fear can take hold of us, The Last Voyage of the Demeter leans into rote recycling and deflates its dread as a result. It is more violent than Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark though less so than The Autopsy of Jane Doe as it overly confines the bursts of bloodshed. These can be joyously squishy and brutal, pushing things further than most mainstream horror movies would, though there remains a ceiling it’s unwilling to burst through.

Where this starts to shift from being merely disappointing to downright frustrating is in terms of the writing. To have a character like the mysterious Anna played by Aisling Franciosi, whose performance in Jennifer Kent’s staggering 2018 film The Nightingale is still one of the best of recent memory, and reduce her to being little more than a way to deliver exposition is a mistake. Some of this comes from the fact that she is a stowaway who spends a large chunk of the film unconscious after the crew discovers her, but she isn’t given much to work with even when she awakens. Despite this, Franciosi forces us to pay attention through the sheer force of her performance alone. The first time she speaks and we see the fear in her eyes is more striking than many of the more elaborate scenes defined by their bloody spectacle. Even some of her final scenes that recall the series Midnight Mass, while unearned in terms of how little care was put into writing her character, are made into something more by just how magnificent of a performer she is. She is given a thankless part and somehow manages to transcend its limitations just enough to bring into focus how much more it could have been. One can only imagine what she would have done with a multidimensional character and how it might have given the film some more emotional depth. Instead, we cycle through scene after scene of the characters trying to piece together what is happening right in front of their faces in a way that starts to feel quite tiresome rather than thrilling.

‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Could Have Used More Wind in Its Sails
Image via Universal

By the time we get to the end, even the climactic confrontation is undercut by much of what preceded it. Without spoiling what plays out, there is one key element that would have been far scarier had the film withheld it a moment longer. Instead, we are one step ahead of the characters and don’t experience the fear that they do when death comes crashing down on them. That the film has been billed as being an “Alien-style horror film” is perhaps true in an abstract sense, but the execution falls far short of that. There is just a fundamental lack of potency to the experience, making the final tease for what feels like a potential sequel silly rather than sinister. For all the ways Botet and company put their hearts into giving it some life, the film is persistently defined by death of not just its characters, but of creativity itself.

Rating: C+

The Big Picture

The Last Voyage of the Demeter suffers from a banality that drains the life out of its nightmarish story, leaving the cast stranded with little direction. The film occasionally delivers on darkness and thrills, but it remains largely sporadic and oddly sluggish on the whole. Despite strong performances, the writing fails to give characters like Aisling Franciosi’s Anna the development they deserve, resulting in missed opportunities for emotional depth.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter comes to theaters on August 11.