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

Let’s say you meet a man named Dracula. Like, truly named Dracula. It might be bizarre, proper? That identify comes with greater than 125 years of connotation, a century-plus of collected cultural information leaving nearly anybody who’s a lot as grazed the Western literary canon hardwired to affiliate “Dracula” with “FUCKING VAMPIRE.”

This implies any story about Dracula, just like the 2023 film The Final Voyage of the Demeter, has an enormous cultural hurdle to clear. Dracula is so ingrained within the tradition that just about all vampire fiction is commenting on him not directly, and any story instantly invoking the Huge Undead Man himself has to right away work out the way it’s going to flee or lean into the highly effective gravitational pull of Bram Stoker’s novel. This isn’t the worst downside on the planet; a intelligent storyteller can do quite a bit with such a large base of cultural information. The potential for dramatic irony right here is frankly scrumptious. The Final Voyage of the Demeter, nevertheless, just isn’t intelligent.

Directed by André Øvredal with a script credited to Bragi Schut Jr. and Bullet Practice’s Zak Olkewicz, The Final Voyage of the Demeter loosely adapts the captain’s log entries from Stoker’s Dracula, a bit of the 1897 novel that briefly particulars how the vampire made his means from his native Transylvania to England. The log entries are little bit of epistolary horror — the equal of discovered footage, in literary type — in regards to the captain and crew of the service provider vessel Demeter slowly realizing that one thing may be very flawed on their ship. Dracula, hidden in a crate of earth being shipped as cargo, begins selecting off the crew one after the other till the Demeter is discovered wrecked on the rocky shores of Whitby, England.

Picture: Common Photos

The Final Voyage of the Demeter imagines what the novel largely implies, a two-hour growth of the Demeter’s doomed journey that trades the novel’s Gothic horror for one thing akin to Ridley Scott’s Alien, however with extra melodrama and fewer subtlety. The movie follows Clemens (Corey Hawkins of Within the Heights), an itinerant Black physician who joins the crew of the Demeter largely by probability. Whereas the ship’s captain, Eliot (Recreation of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham), welcomes Clemens aboard, the crew regards him with suspicion — partly as a result of he’s a newcomer amongst a tight-knit group of sailors, and partly due to prejudices they harbor.

Clemens, of their eyes, has two marks towards him: his race and his training. To the crew, the latter specifically means he’s probably unaccustomed to the bodily calls for of life at sea, and no completely different from the cargo they have to safeguard throughout the ocean. The Final Voyage of the Demeter makes little or no of this dynamic. It’s largely useful, a personality beat meant to assist foster distrust because the vampire begins selecting off cattle and crew.

Actually, The Final Voyage of the Demeter makes little or no of most of its potential belongings. It’s a movie with no imaginative and prescient, a puzzling adaptation that’s so simple, viewers may consider each beat comes from Stoker’s novel and never a screenplay imagining what occurred between the pages. Perhaps the 20 years the movie spent in improvement, being rewritten and recast, are in charge; each colourful alternative appears to have been wrung out of the script. At each second, there’s potential for Demeter to develop into one thing distinct and attention-grabbing, however the screenplay and Øvredal’s route select in any other case, embracing simple competence over any type or aptitude. It’s dry historic fiction, Horatio Hornblower’s Dracula.

Picture: Reiner Bajo/Common Photos

It is a movie that has the potential to be a paranoid thriller, however dodges paranoia as shortly as potential. It’s a slasher movie that resists racking up a physique rely, a supernatural horror movie that isn’t significantly desirous about exploring the supernatural. Most significantly, it’s a vampire movie about essentially the most well-known of vampires, with just about not one of the subtext that makes the bloodsuckers so scary and enduring, nor the camp that may make them so enjoyable. It’s an ordinary monster film, with an vague and undistinguished monster.

The Final Voyage of the Demeter is a irritating film. The viewers is aware of what to anticipate from vampires, however the characters don’t, and with out compelling characterization or stylistic aptitude, we’re left watching them be idiots in denial for 2 hours. Severely — there’s a scene the place the characters discover the crate the place Dracula sleeps, know that’s what it’s, that he’s already killed a lot of the crew, and that they’ve a robust weapon towards him, after which… do nothing about it? It boggles the thoughts.

There aren’t any surprises in The Final Voyage of the Demeter. Nearly every little thing within the story performs out precisely how the common horror fan may assume it could, precisely how they know it would, as a result of the film begins with the top of the story, then does little to play up the dread that comes with that information. And most of us, sadly, know an excessive amount of about this story already. Haven’t you heard? The man’s identify is Dracula.

The Final Voyage of the Demeter debuts in theaters on Aug. 11.