“The Last Voyage of the Demeter” takes one of Bram Stoker’s most chilling ideas—an entire ship slowly devoured by an unseen terror—and asks, “What if we made it longer, darker (literally), and somehow less scary?” It’s Alien-at-sea without the dread, Master and Commander without the mastery, and Dracula without the bite. If you’ve ever wanted to spend two hours in a damp hallway while a bat-faced ghoul plays peekaboo behind a tarp, congratulations: your ship has come in, hit a reef, and then thoughtfully circled back to hit the same reef again.
Let’s start with the mood lighting, because it’s doing nine-tenths of the heavy lifting and none of the heavy scaring. Cinematography here is an all-you-can-eat buffet of murk. Moonlight? Murk. Lanterns? Designer murk. Noon? Surprise murk. There are moments where I was sure the Dolby projector had simply refused service. The Demeter isn’t just doomed; it’s dimmed. The aesthetic seems to be “museum exhibit titled: Wet Wood.” If the plan was to hide the seams of the creature effects, mission accomplished; I could scarcely make out my own despair, let alone the Count.
The script feels like it was smuggled aboard in a crate labeled “Exposition.” Every character line reads like a résumé written under duress. Corey Hawkins, a genuinely compelling presence, is forced to stride the deck announcing his Cambridge credentials like a LinkedIn post that learned to walk. “I’m a doctor and an astronomer,” he says, and the movie replies, “Neat—can you hold this lantern while we wait for the next person to wander off alone?” Hawkins keeps his dignity, which is heroic given how often the plot insists on testing it with barrels of foreshadowing and barrels of actual barrels.
Aisling Franciosi’s Anna has promise—a literal stowaway slave of Dracula pulled from a coffin of dirt—but the film gives her the narrative function of a pop-up tool tip: “Press X to learn the word ‘Dracula.’” She warns, she wilts, she evaporates in sunlight like an interesting arc. It’s not Franciosi’s fault; the screenplay is allergic to letting any human being be the protagonist. Everyone’s job is to be a snack and, occasionally, a speech.
And what of the doomed crew? Liam Cunningham brings grizzled captain gravitas and gets paid back with a cinematic wedgie. David Dastmalchian, who can make a single worried blink interesting, is quartermaster Wojchek, aka Mr. “We Should Probably Leave.” The rest are shipped in from central casting: the loyal cook, the skittish sailor, the guy whose very cheekbones declare “redshirt.” A small boy is present to up the stakes and then, in a choice that’s bold on paper and bludgeoning in practice, he’s dispatched in a sequence that mistakes cruelty for courage. It’s grim, yes; it’s also weirdly hollow, like the movie checked off a box labeled “serious” and moved on.
Dracula himself (Javier Botet) is a feral, winged rat-king—less seductive aristocrat, more late-stage yard bat. Botet is a physical-performance legend, but he’s trapped in a design that’s all snarl and no soul. This Dracula can skitter and screech; he cannot, apparently, unnerve beyond the first reveal. The creature is deployed with all the finesse of a boss fight: he appears, hisses, pounces, repeat. The film keeps acting like it’s a treat to see him when it plays more like a timer went off. When at last he dons a hat and strolls London-ward, it lands like a punchline to a joke the movie forgot to set up: “Surprise, he’s also a guy in a coat.” Right—terrifying. I too fear well-dressed men in alleyways; I call them “weekends.”
André Øvredal can stage a set piece—Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe proved that—but here the geography is all sliding doors, clattering ropes, and “wait, which corridor is this again?” The Demeter is a maze that never becomes a character; it’s just a scapegoat for the plotting. We detour down the same ladders to the same cargo hold to stare at the same cursed crates, as if repetition will transmute routine into ritual. There’s a carefully telegraphed rule about sunlight (cue several, “Tie him to the mast!” moments) that gets hammered so often it turns into a drinking game. (Please don’t; you’ll fall asleep and still be correct about how this ends.)
Bear McCreary’s score works hard—the man always does—but the music swells like a substitute for tension, not an embellishment. When the strings wail, they feel less like a chorus of doom and more like a helpful reminder that, yes, something is technically happening. Meanwhile, the sound mix treats whispered exposition like a state secret and jump-scare shrieks like the only mode of international diplomacy.
The film’s biggest missed opportunity is baked into the concept. “The Captain’s Log” chapter is terrifying because it’s a slow-burn diary of sanity unspooling. This adaptation chooses the most literal path: show us the kills in chronological order, add a handful of modern monster-movie beats, and hope atmosphere will grow like mold on wet planks. Imagine if we’d lived inside the captain’s entries as hallucination and reality intertwined. Instead, we get cutaways to a logbook like a maritime timesheet—boxes ticked, crew diminished, audience patience filed under “pending.”
There’s also the small matter of the third act’s grand shrug. After spending what feels like a fortnight establishing that Dracula is a nautical problem, the movie ejects to London with a sequel-bait smirk. Clemens vows to hunt the Count—great, a Victorian John Wick but with vaccines—and we’re meant to fist-pump, I guess? It’s a bizarre tonal pivot: two hours of “no one can survive this,” capped with “tune in next time when our hero learns to parkour.” If you’re going to end on “to be continued,” maybe first be… compelling.
Look, there are a handful of effective images: a silhouette in the rigging that reads as omen; a body cocooned by sailcloth, twitching; sunlight licking a vampiric thrall like a fuse. Øvredal can compose a gothic postcard. But you can’t ship a movie on postcards, and you certainly can’t scare with a scrapbook of “here’s that thing again.” The repetition numbs. The characters thin. The water level of interest recedes until the only thing left on the beach is the score and a very confused hat.
If you absolutely must watch people wander below decks carrying lanterns while muttering about the hold, your needs have been exquisitely met. If you were hoping for a nervy, claustrophobic descent into maritime madness—a film that earns the inevitability of its doom—this is less last voyage and more extended layover. The Demeter deserves a captain; it got a committee. Dracula deserves mystery; he got a series of calendar alerts.
By the time the ship beaches and the Count lets out a victory scream that sounds like a teakettle having an existential crisis, the only blood truly drained is the audience’s enthusiasm. The credits promise a hunt; I promise I’ve already moved on. Pack your seabags with garlic and patience if you insist. Better yet, stay ashore, reread the chapter, and let your imagination do what this movie so carefully avoids: anything.
