The Last Voyage of the Demeter review – Dracula horror is lost at sea

As Universal continues to find creative ways to rework its iconic monster movies in the shadow of the iconically disastrous Dark Universe (a set of interconnected horrors cancelled after Tom Cruise’s Mummy wrapped up with a loss), there’s an alluring elevator pitch at the heart of their latest offering. Rather than retelling Bram Stoker’s Dracula in full once again, why not take one chapter, The Captain’s Log, detailing his journey on boat from Romania to England, and dig into what happened to the crew members he feasted on?

Related: What was Dracula really like? 550-year-old clue to life of Vlad the Impaler emerges

But coming just months after Renfield, this year’s other novel spin on Dracula, focused on the cursed count’s even more cursed aide, it’s another idea that works better as a logline than a full movie, stretched to breaking point in The Last Voyage of Demeter, a 2-hour film with frighteningly very little to feast on. It’s mostly fascinating for its existence, a gothic period horror made on an unusually grand scale, harking back to the days of Hammer, an outlier in a genre landscape that usually bets on smaller budgets aimed at a younger audience. It might explain why it’s taken two decades for the film to make it to the screen, a voyage through development hell that took in stars such as Noomi Rapace, Viggo Mortensen, Jude Law and Ben Kingsley and directors such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Marcus Nispel, The Descent’s Neil Marshall and Flightplan’s Robert Schwentke. The script, originally written by Escape Room’s Bragi Schut Jr, has also seen multiple revisions with Bullet Train’s Zak Olkewicz receiving a co-credit and at least five other writers noted as helping with off-screen additional material.

Production finally began over two years ago, with Troll Hunter’s André Øvredal at the helm, and the finished result is hard to extricate from this tortured process – the film very much the end product of far too many cooks toiling away for far too long. What often happens with a movie that takes so long to go from pitch to premiere is that those involved tend to forget the whys and whats, the mission of making something overriding the motivation. Twenty years on, it’s hard to understand why we’re on this journey and who is supposed to care.

The Straight Outta Compton alum and two-time Tony nominee Corey Hawkins (who also managed to be the best part of Joel Coen’s starry take on Macbeth in 2021) tries hard as anchor, playing a doctor who finds his way onto the ill-fated Demeter, alongside a mostly unwelcoming crew led by Liam Cunningham as captain. There’s a shipment of large boxes, contents of which are unknown, but as the ship takes to the water, there begins a sneaking suspicion that something monstrous might be onboard.

One of the film’s great many errors is fatally misunderstanding the unique appeal of Dracula as an all-timer villain. The very best adaptations have had the breadth to use him as both man and monster, the suave to the savage, but here, he’s reduced to just some creature, a production line B-movie baddie and a poorly designed one at that, looking like a gargoyle just came to life. The effort that’s clearly been funneled into the film’s extravagant production design has been weirdly withheld from that of Dracula himself, a cheap and immediately unscary beast, set to trouble only the dreams of those who could have done a better job in bringing him to life.

Despite the setting, the film also lacks the oppressive claustrophobia it desperately needs, the nightmarish fear of being trapped with a monster in an inescapable place, heading towards doom. Schut Jr has spoken of Alien as inspiration but unlike that film, an inspiration to so many, he’s never able to either make the workplace tensions crackle or truly immerse us in the awful clamminess of such a predicament. With suspense then at zero, Øvredal goes full steam ahead with some admirably uncensored gore and some less easy-to-admire jump scares more likely to cause eye-rolling than seat-ejecting. Hawkins is fine enough, with a British accent that’s mostly passable but his character is written without a shred of conviction, confusingly discordant moments of exposition making him a mystery to us, while Aisling Franciosi, slowly becoming the new Elisabeth Moss of actors whose roles are defined almost entirely by trauma, is effective in a limited capacity as a surprise crew-mate, boxed up for later snacking. There’s no real surprise to where we’re heading, given the source material, and so a great deal of the film is a rather meandering wait for the inevitable.

It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.

• The Last Voyage of the Demeter is out in Australian cinemas now, in US cinemas on 11 August and in the UK later this year