There's so little nautical horror out there, that's it's kind of a shame to write off this handsome, well-crafted movie as "eh, it's pretty solid, I guess."
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is famous for being based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula - the one where the novel takes a break from its epistolary format and instead transcribes the contents of the captain's log for the doomed vessel Dracula hired to make his overseas voyage to English shores.
Appropriately enough, the film is better known here in the UK for completely disappearing after its US release, only to wash up without fanfare on the barren coasts of Amazon prime a year later. Vampires are no match against the true horror that is international licensing rights.
Corey Hawkins stars as Clemens, a doctor who signs on to the crew of the Demeter to seek passage back to the UK after a bad job interview. Once on the ship he finds a woman (Aisling Franciosi) entombed on one of the many wooden containers in the hold, rescues her, and nurses her back to health. Unbeknownst to him and the rest of the crew, the woman was to be the good count's meal... and so everyone becomes fair game instead.
It's a very serious movie - dour, even, which fits director André Øvredal's sensibilities to a tee. Technically, it's impeccable; The ship is beautifully realised, and a prelude set at a Romanian port shows off some pretty high-end production values - horror or otherwise. Tom Stern's cinematography, meanwhile, beautifully captures the allure of the nautical setting during the daytime, and drips with atmosphere once the monster starts prowling above and below deck.
Said monster is, some slightly dodgy CGI aside, pretty good: Good old Vlad at his most bestial, basically looking like a leather gargoyle. His methods are very enjoyably brutal (I'd recommend a visit to doesthedogdie.com if you have any such triggers), and Øvredal gives him a few really effective horror moments and some neat moves.
Sadly there's just not enough there... and as shiny as all the surfaces are, they don't manage to cover a lack of anything of substance underneath. Writers Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz (and some others along the way) provide a plot that is both basic and generic, with a heavy helping of really dumb decisions. You'd think that in the more than three decades the script spent being rewritten in development hell, someone would have thought of some justification as to why the crew, once they figure out what's going on, don't use the daylight to their advantage... but no such luck. There's the odd good line (The captain gets a killer line when discussing steam boats), but other than that the film completely relies on its budget, technical aspects, the setting, and some excellent acting (Besides Hawkins, the mellifluous Liam Cunningham and a brooding David Dastmalchian make a big impression as the captain and his very slavic second in command) to do all the heavy lifting.
And maybe that would have worked on a shorter, punchier movie. But at nearly two hours, the good just barely outweighs the bad.
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