Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, Chris Walley, Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Martin Furuland, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Woody Norman, Javier Botet, Graham Turner, Andy Murray, Nicola Passetti, Christopher York, Vladimir Cabek, Rudolf Danielewicz, Noureddine Farihi, Malcolm Galea, Adam Shaw, Jack Doggart, Joe Depasquale, Sally Reeve.
The 19th Century should arguably be considered the pinnacle of a certain kind of literature expression, the almost scalpel like precision of the gothic horror which had been crafted by the mother of monsters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which continued through the eyes of the early American master Edgar Allen Poe in which he skilfully broadened the scenes with detective like urgency, and through to the fierce damnation offered by the Irish writer Bram Stoker as he unleashed a different kind of evil, seductive, riddled with non-normative sexuality, the allusion of sexual diseases, namely syphilis, had on the reader as they got to grips with the exotic and demonic like Count Dracula.
Dracula is a book to which many are called, you want to understand the psycho-sexual nature, the rage against the so-called hedonism of the underbelly of the sexual counter culture of Victorian England, the repression of ideal, and the bitterness of the so called ‘foreigner’ bringing infection and pestilence across the Channel, then no other book of its time focuses the mind more than the one laid out the Dublin born writer.
One particular chapter in Dracula though barely ever gets a look in when it comes to adaption in film or in a television series, and as its chapter size is relatively small as not to be a concern in the greater context of detail, The Captain’s Log nevertheless can be seen as the perfect interlude between Jonathan Harker’s discovery of the evil at hand, and the threat that England faced as the dark lord of Vampires landed on the country’s east coast.
The adaption of that small, yet incredibly vivid and expressive part of the book may seem an unlikely setting for a larger experience, but in true cinematic fashion, anything that has a following can, and should be, presented on screen, and in The Last Voyage of The Demeter, all the intensity of those few pages are magnified, they are expanded, the fear heightened, and the mood of panic increased, and whilst it could be said by some that the film falls because there is not trapdoor of the undiscovered for the audience to fall into, no surprise pathos or surprise, the very fact that Bragi F. Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewiz’s screenplay, and under the exposed light of Andre Øvredal’s direction, what comes across is the bountiful pity of the damned.
We need no resolution of justice in such a film for the allegories at play, the symbols of excommunication of spirit, of a virus in the form of a creature plucked from Hell itself, is the decree, it is end of times afloat as it passes by the various Catholic and Arab dominated world with their own passages of terminal purgatory deeply engrained into the populace’s psyche, and to England, to the crumbled and deeply repressed people to whom are still resented from turning their back on God.
Every scene is placed under the microscope of what it means to either be English, educated, a sailor, superstitious, a woman, or infected, and as The Demeter sails towards its doom, as England awaits this blackening, the cancer of plague and a monster of foul possession, so the viewer is entreated to a film that whilst not receiving its proper time at the cinema, is one to be entreated upon with a large degree of dread and anxiety pumping the heart.
With superb performances from Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, and Javier Botet, The Last Voyage of The Demeter is a film of worthy addition to the adapted work of Bram Stoker. A fiercely entrusted exposure of narrative.
Ian D. Hall