A crew sailing from Carpathia to England find that they are carrying very dangerous cargo.
Chuck says:
Much like the titular vessel, Andre Ovredal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is doomed from the start. Overlong, tedious, and bearing the cross of a well-known conclusion – which the director errs in changing – the film is a vain attempt to approach the “Dracula” story from a different angle. Based on roughly four pages from chapter seven of Bram Stoker’s seminal horror classic, screenwriters Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz fall short in their attempt to flesh out this brief sequence, inventing characters while conjuring a story that resembles a revolving door with its illusion of motion. The result is a waste not only of handsome production work but the efforts of a fine cast.
Opening with the discovery of the shipwreck of the cargo vessel The Demeter, the film is told in flashback as English authorities peruse the diary of the ship’s captain, trying to ascertain why the entire crew is absent. Having left Carpathia bound for England, a shipment of 50 crates were laded for transport. While not unusual as cargo goes, the reaction of one of the dock workers to it portends bad tidings. The captain (Liam Cunningham) and his first mate (David Dastmalchian) ignore the man’s ravings that something evil lurks within them, intent on getting to sea and finishing their voyage.
Among the crew is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), an exiled doctor eager to return to England, as well as Toby (Woody Norman), the captain’s grandson. These characters, as well as their shipmates, are not in the source material, yet their inclusion here is sound as it does not defy the logic of the film or novel’s premise. However, where the character of Anna (Aisling Franciosi) is concerned, Schut and Olkewicz make a serious blunder. Found as a stowaway, having been discovered in one of the boxes of soil, she eventually reveals that Dracula has brought her along to feed on her during the voyage. This reasoning simply doesn’t hold water as the vampire would need more than one person to prey upon over the course of a three-week journey. “Anna” exists only to appeal to a particular demographic in the audience and nothing more.
Am I nitpicking? Perhaps, but errors like this not only insult the viewer but their illogical nature take us out of the story. Equally troubling is the film’s conclusion, which attempts to revise Stoker’s tale by introducing a character that would logically come to interact with Van Helsing, Harker, and the other vampire hunters. Obviously, he won’t because he doesn’t exist in the novel, this ill-thought-out revision an attempt to pander to the audience.
I know I’m coming off as a stickler for details, but this is a lazy effort that unnecessarily dumbs down the novel. The assembled cast is very good, each actor showing a conviction in the material it doesn’t deserve. Equally impressive is the production design, the Demeter meticulously rendered, its cargo hold seen as a mysterious labyrinth of small dark rooms and narrow dangerous passageways, its deck a vast platform of detailed iron and woodwork, which is hard to appreciate as so much of the action takes place at night.
As for the King of Vampires himself, he lurks in the shadows, becoming more visible as the film progresses. Any sense of suavity seen in the Count in previous incarnations is gone – this is a primal beast, more bat than man, a one-dimensional construct that fails to thrill, as do the action sequences Ovredal cobbles together. The various attacks that occur are all muddled, undone by a lack of lighting and quick cutting. There’s no horror here, just confusion.
Of course, anyone with a passing knowledge of “Dracula” knows how this story turns out and that’s a problem “Demeter” cannot overcome. Instead, what we’re given is an unnecessarily long slog towards the inevitable, an opportunity wasted to shed new light on one of pop culture’s legendary characters, who is seen as nothing but a background extra.
2 Stars
