REVIEW: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

Movie Reviews

The Last Voyage of the Demeter comes frustratingly close to being a good little horror movie – no classic, but an effective, thoughtful creep-fest. It’s got wonderful atmosphere, a strong cast, and a sure-handed director who knows how to get the most from a fairly limited budget. But it stumbles on both the setup and payoff, keeping the characters just short of relatable and the grand theme unexplored. And, of course, it can’t help but derail an arc by delving into race.

A ship called the Demeter sets sail for London from Bulgaria with a newly hired crew and a mysterious box bearing a dragon symbol. Once at sea, gruesome deaths occur until the crew realizes they’re not alone, and something evil came aboard in that box.

There seems to be a fascination with the Demeter section of Dracula lately. The Netflix miniseries Dracula – which was so awful I couldn’t force myself to watch the end – set its entire second episode on board the Demeter, which didn’t work. (They spun it as a murder mystery, with the crew trying to figure out who the killer was; spoiler alert: it’s Dracula.)  Now, we have The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a whole movie about the events on the ship. It’s an interesting choice because this is such a small part of the book and previous movies; in my edition of Dracula, it takes up six pages, fewer than the discovery of the boat that precedes it. And that makes sense because there isn’t traditionally much to tell; Dracula used the Demeter to travel to England and killed everyone on board. It’s a bit of horror that sets the stakes for his new stomping ground: Dracula kills everything in his path, so England better be prepared. It’s nowhere near the centerpiece of the story.

For a while, however, The Last Voyage of the Demeter manages to carve a decent horror story from the limited source material. The Demeter is presented as a creepy ship, old and rotting and full of rats and other animals that chirp and bellow. The below decks are dark and dank, with even the dining area shrouded in shadows. And the sound design is marvelous; the ship is constantly creaking as it sails the seas, with the jangle of chains and metal keeping you uneasy in the darkness. When night falls, the Demeter is engulfed in a thick fog, allowing the odd glimmer of whatever it is that’s bringing death to a simple cargo ship. The movie creates tremendous atmosphere, which is the key to making horror work, and you begin to understand why they thought they could make a movie just out of Dracula’s time on the Demeter.

The depiction of Dracula also works. If you’ve seen the trailers or even the poster, you know this is the Nosferatu version of the Count, the demonic creature as opposed to the charming aristocrat. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a monster movie, and it never shies away from that, never succumbs to what must have been an enticing temptation to lean into the Dracula tropes that virtually every film of his embraces. He’s a creature, and the special effects are… probably not great. It’s hard to tell because the film keeps him mostly hidden, obscured by shadow and fog, with only the occasional glimpse of the devil haunting the Demeter. As with something like Meg 2, I suspect this is at least in part to hide some flimsy special effects; a couple of shots of Dracula up close indicate that the CGI is rubbery and unconvincing. But this is a happy accident; unlike Meg 2, The Last Voyage of the Demeter uses this to maximum effect, with director André Øvredal creating a haunting tale of an unstoppable evil and the men (and one woman) caught in its path.

But The Last Voyage of the Demeter stumbles in its character work. The cast has some great actors, particularly Liam Cunningham as the captain ready to retire after this last haul and David Dastmalchian as his crusty first mate. Dastmalchian is unrecognizable in his role, perfectly embodying a salty sea dog forever trying to prove his worth. The problem is that the movie features very little character work, and what we like about these guys we get from the actors. For example, there’s a scene between these two where Cunningham tells Destmalchian that he will retire after this voyage, and he wants Destmalchian to take over for him. The actors are terrific, and it would have meant a lot had the relationship between the two men been established beforehand. But we have no sense of them, so the scene is weightless, just a rote plot point rather than a tender moment between friends.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter spends more time with Corey Hawkins’ character, Mr. Clemens, a doctor sailing back to England who convinces the captain to let him join the crew. Everything starts off well, as he is initially denied a position on the Demeter because he’s an educated man, not the physical laborer they need, but he earns his place by saving the captain’s son from an accident. Once aboard, he reveals that his motivation for traveling is that, as a doctor and a man of science, he wants to learn how the world works, particularly how people work. That’s good; it makes sense, it fits with the character, and it’s plenty to set up a lead in a horror story. But, of course, in the latter half of the film, his motivation changes from being a scientist to racism because Corey Hawkins is black, and Hollywood “creatives” just can’t help themselves. This stuff sucks because it immediately takes you out of the movie, and it turns Clemens from being a character to being a symbol of something that doesn’t fit the story.

The lead character’s arc also suffers, and that’s because The Last Voyage of the Demeter is inconsistent with its theme. The film is about science vs. religion, and it sets this up well, with Clemens the representative of science while the rest of the crew is either Christian or superstitious in the way sailors were back then. You can see where this should be going: the man of science who wants to discover the way the world works is pitted against a supernatural evil, something that can only be explained by religious concepts of heaven and hell, God and the Devil. But it never follows through, never gives Clemens the arc his characterization demands. Lip service is paid to it very late in the movie, but we never see him change; we’re just politely informed of it when it no longer matters. This isn’t just me complaining that I didn’t get what I wanted; it’s a lack of payoff for a storyline that is clearly established, only to be abandoned. It doesn’t help that the film wimps out at the end, with the implied conclusion to a story about the Demeter softened.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is so close to being good, clawing at drama it never achieves and big ideas it’s too timid to explore. In the end, it’s an okay horror movie that should provide some thrills if you’re a fan of the genre. But I don’t see people wanting to revisit this one like they do the classic Dracula movies.