119 min | R | August 11, 2023 | Universal Pictures
A merchant ship leaves the Carpathian coast carrying crates of dirt and one passenger who only moves after dark. Every night at sea, the crew loses another man. The voyage is doomed before it leaves port, and the movie is in no hurry to get there.
The Demeter is a merchant ship hauling unmarked crates from the Carpathian coast to London. One crate holds dirt and a passenger. The passenger is Dracula, and he feeds on the crew one night at a time. André Øvredal builds the entire film out of a single chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel, the captain’s log that records the ship reaching England with no one alive aboard. The result is a creature feature locked inside a haunted house that floats. The film knows its ending before it begins and spends its length stalling for it.
Corey Hawkins plays Clemens, a Cambridge-trained physician who cannot get a post in England because he is Black and signs onto the Demeter instead. Hawkins gives the doctor a rationalist’s stubbornness that the supernatural keeps overruling. Aisling Franciosi plays Anna, a stowaway the crew finds drained and half-dead in the cargo hold. She recovers into the one person aboard who understands what they are carrying. David Dastmalchian plays the first mate Wojchek as a hard, practical man who treats the mounting deaths as a labor problem before he accepts them as a curse. Liam Cunningham plays Captain Eliot with a tired decency that the film uses up faster than it should.
Øvredal directs from a script by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz that stretches a few pages into a full voyage. The ship is the best thing on screen. The production design renders the Demeter as a maze of wet timber and lantern light, and the camera treats every hatch and companionway as a hiding place for something unseen. Javier Botet plays Dracula as a bat-skinned, skeletal predator rather than a caped aristocrat, and the design lands hardest when the film keeps him in shadow. The score leans on low strings and sudden stings to manufacture dread the staging cannot sustain. The editing marks time in nights, and each night arrives on the same beat as the last.
The problem is structural. A story told as a countdown needs surprise inside the inevitability, and this one offers little. We meet the crew, we learn the order in which they will die, and the film delivers exactly that. Hawkins and Dastmalchian give it more weight than the writing earns, and the ship itself supplies a real sense of dread. The voyage is handsome and competent and stretched thin over water that should have stayed a single chapter.