In the Flesh: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter isn’t going to pull in many accolades for its script, which at its best hits its marks and knows its lines and at its worst blunders into rushed and jumbled exposition, but the bestial Dracula (Javier Botet) is so chilling and the film’s scares and shocks so substantial and unnerving that it hardly matters what the underdeveloped characters are saying. Would it be a better movie if they were all a little more fleshed out? Sure, but they’re the forgivable element to whiff on here, and the cast itself is skilled enough to keep the film from dragging. Liam Cunningham might be the most perfect choice imaginable for salty old sea dog Captain Elliot, and Corey Hawkins is game and absurdly good-looking as doctor Clemens, a Black man held back by racism from practicing his profession, and if Aisling Fraciosi is a little wasted as a waifish Romani girl from a village long terrorized by Dracula, child actor Woody Norman more than picks up the slack in the heartstrings department as the captain’s serious and immediately lovable grandchild and ship’s boy, Toby.

The part you can’t whiff on, and which Demeter hits dead center, is the ship’s famous stowaway, who starts out here as a kind of pallid, crawling carcass somewhere between Gollum and Count Orlock. Our first glimpses of Dracula are fleeting and murky, and his wormlike whiteness renders him disturbingly vulnerable-looking. His face is long and slack, his movements alternately piteous and lightning-quick. When he clambers up into the ship’s rigging after a panicked Olgaren (Stefan Kapičić), his mocking, quavering echo of Olgaren’s desperate pleas drips with sadistic delight. “No,” the vampire whimpers, eyes twinkling merrily in the moonlight, hagfish mouth stretched into a grotesque grin. “Don’t.” Director André Øvredal frequently foregrounds him to great effect, and shots of the vampire lurking in partial silhouette in the background of the ship’s hold and its desolate deck are unnerving and slightly melancholy. Dracula’s kills are nasty and prolonged, and the film is admirably, even shockingly ruthless with its cast. A scene in which a character is dragged into Dracula’s embrace and enfolded in his wings, the impression of their screaming face bulging through their membranes, is worth the price of admission all on its own.

Yes, the ending is rushed, sloppy, and clearly aiming for a sequel that will A: never come and B: would presumably be the rest of, you know, Dracula, but The Last Voyage of the Demeter is made with skill and craftsmanship on many levels. Not even the jumbled pacing and plotting of its final action sequence can derail the rock-solid scares and tension-building of its middle act, a wonderfully confident stretch of filmmaking that really does feel like a worthy successor to the golden age of the Universal Monsters film series. Had it been a little less eager to hook itself seamlessly into the greater Dracula legendarium, a little more willing to embrace the bleakness its premise implies, it might have been something really worth writing home about. As it is, Demeter succeeds as an ambitious B movie bolstered by sterling visuals. The ever-changing design of the creature is a treat in a largely stagnant field, and the film’s digital matte paintings are frankly stunning, the sort of thing you hardly ever see these days. All in all, you could do a lot worse.

This piece 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.