The Last Voyage of the Demeter review: Dracula’s Lyft gets a bad rating

Let’s say you meet a guy named Dracula. Imagine a guy named Dracula. That would be odd, wouldn’t it? That name comes with more than 125 years of connotation, a century-plus of accumulated cultural knowledge leaving just about anyone who’s so much as grazed the Western literary canon hardwired to associate “Dracula” with “FUCKING Vampire.”

Any story about Dracula like the movie 2023. The Last Voyage of the DemeterThe cultural obstacle that. has to jump is huge. Dracula has become so embedded in culture, that it is virtually impossible to escape. The following are some of the most effective ways to improve your own personal effectiveness. vampire fiction is commenting on him in some way, and any story directly invoking the Big Undead Man himself has to immediately figure out how it’s going to escape or lean into the powerful gravitational pull of Bram Stoker’s novel. This isn’t the worst problem in the world; a clever storyteller can do a lot with such a wide base of cultural knowledge. It’s a delicious opportunity to use dramatic irony. Last Voyage of the DemeterIt isn’t clever.

Directed by André Øvredal with a script credited to Bragi Schut Jr. and Bullet Train’s Zak Olkewicz, The Last Voyage of the Demeter loosely adapts the captain’s log entries from Stoker’s Dracula, an excerpt from the 1897 book that briefly explains how the vampire made it to England from Transylvania. The log entries are a good bit of epistolary horror — the equivalent of found footage, in literary form — about the captain and crew of the merchant vessel Demeter slowly realizing that something is very wrong on their ship. Dracula begins killing the Demeter crew by taking out the earth crate that was being transported as cargo.

Universal Pictures

The Last Voyage of the Demeter imagines what the novel mostly implies, a two-hour expansion of the Demeter’s doomed journey that trades the novel’s Gothic horror for something akin to Ridley Scott’s AlienThe film follows Clemens (Corey Hawkins of “The Office”) as he tries to find his way in the world. Clemens is played by Corey Hawkins. In the Heights)An itinerant Black physician who joined the Demeter crew mostly by accident. While the ship’s captain, Eliot (Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham), welcomes Clemens aboard, the crew regards him with suspicion — partly because he’s a newcomer among a tight-knit group of sailors, and partly because of prejudices they harbor.

Clemens is viewed as having two negative marks: His education and race. To the crew, the latter in particular means he’s likely unaccustomed to the physical demands of life at sea, and no different from the cargo they must safeguard across the ocean. The Last Voyage of the DemeterThe film makes little use of this dynamic. It’s mostly functional, a character beat meant to help foster mistrust as the vampire begins picking off cattle and crew.

It is not true. The Last Voyage of the DemeterIt makes little use of the majority of its assets. It’s a film with no vision, a puzzling adaptation that’s so straightforward, viewers might believe every beat comes from Stoker’s novel and not a screenplay imagining what happened between the pages. It could be that it spent two decades in development being rewritten, recast and then rewritten again. Every colorful choice seemed to have been squeezed out of the screenplay. At every moment, there’s potential for Demeter to become something distinct and interesting, but the screenplay and Øvredal’s direction choose otherwise, embracing straightforward competence over any style or flair. It’s dry historical fiction, Horatio Hornblower’s Dracula.

Photo: Reiner Bajo/Universal Pictures

The film has all the makings of a thriller but avoids it as much as possible. It’s a slasher film that resists racking up a body count, a supernatural horror film that isn’t particularly interested in exploring the supernatural. Most importantly, it’s a vampire film about the most famous of vampires, with virtually none of the subtext that makes the bloodsuckers so frightening and enduring, nor the camp that can make them so fun. It’s a standard monster movie, with an indistinct and undistinguished monster.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter This is an annoying movie. The audience knows what to expect from vampires, but the characters do not, and without compelling characterization or stylistic flair, we’re left watching them be idiots in denial for two hours. Seriously — there’s a scene where the characters find the crate where Dracula sleeps, know that’s what it is, that he’s already killed most of the crew, and that they have a powerful weapon against him, and then… do nothing about it? The mind is blown.

No surprises here The Last Voyage of the Demeter. The plot unfolds in exactly the way that the average horror enthusiast might expect it to, and exactly the same as they would imagine. Know more The movie will be a disappointment, as it starts with the conclusion of the tale, and does not do much to accentuate the terror that this brings. Unfortunately, most people already know a lot about the story. Haven’t you heard? The guy’s name is Dracula.

The Last Voyage of the DemeterOn August 11, the film premieres in theatres.