Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter: A terrific showcase of old-school techniques and skills

Dracula: The Voyage of the Demeter (R16, 119 mins) Directed by André Øvredal ***½

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for a book published in 1897, is still a cracking read. The plot might be a bit over-familiar now, but the structure of the novel still feels modern and clever.

Dracula is told in a series of letters, journal entries and newspaper clippings. (If it ever comes up at your pub quiz, Dracula is what’s known as an epistolary novel)

Chapter seven of Dracula deals with how the bloody Count made his way to England, on board the schooner The Demeter. The chapter is mostly made up of entries from the journal of the captain of the ship. He describes taking on board 50 wooden crates in Bulgaria and being promised a handsome bonus to get them to London. For the first week or two of the voyage, everything seems fine – and then crew members start to disappear, always at night.

Reports reach the captain of a tall, thin man being onboard, despite the ship carrying no passengers of that description. A day out from England, the captain, alone on the ship and mostly mad, lashes himself to the wheel and vows to make port or die trying. That is the last entry in the journal.

That single chapter of Dracula is somewhere in the whakapapa of every murders-at-sea novel and movie ever, up to and including Ridley Scott’s Alien.

“The Captain’s Log” – as Stoker titled it – is such a full and self-contained story, I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t been adapted into a stand-feature before now. Or if it has, me and Google can’t find it tonight. Even Francis Ford Coppola’s mighty retelling of Dracula in 1992 mostly omitted The Demeter.

But, after a few decades stuck in development hell, André Øvredal (Trollhunter) is here to have a crack at it. And, to be fair, we’ve all seen worse Dracula films than this.

Øvredal sticks close enough to Stoker’s plot, even though the original text doesn’t feature a young woman onboard the ship, who the crew at first think is a stowaway. In the audience, we guess pretty fast that she has been brought along by Dracula as a packed lunch for the journey.

The crew start to vanish like teens in a Halloween instalment – and with barely less screaming and gore. Øvredal whittles Voyage of the Demeter down to a small core-cast with an efficiency that must have thrilled the payroll accountants, and then dials in a fairly busy and noisome third and final act as the ship speeds towards Pomgolia and the beastie has no further need of sailors to get him where he is going.

Voyage of the Demeter is a good-looking film, with some real production values visible in every stitch of the wardrobe and splinter of the carpentry. We all like to see some old-fashioned craft on screen and The Demeter’s mostly German and Maltese crew have done themselves proud.

The cast are also solid and efficient, led by Corey Hawkins (The Tragedy of Macbeth) and Irish veteran Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) as the ship’s doctor and captain. Aisling Franciosi (Black Narcissus) is fine as the unwitting snack – and the rest of the players acquit themselves well.

But my favourite element within the production was surely Dracula himself, played by Spanish actor Javier Botet – all 2.01 metres and 56 kilos of him. It makes me happy to see filmmakers re-embracing the old magic of make-up and costumes – enhanced by CGI, of course – to portray their monsters and demons.

Voyage of the Demeter doesn’t have enough scares to qualify as a great horror movie – and it is far too daft to work as a drama. But it scores as a showcase of technique and skills that are happily in resurgence. Also, the score from Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica) is an absolute beast. If film-music is your thing, you might want to get a ticket just to experience that.

Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter isn’t a great film. But its component parts are mostly very good. On a big screen, with a real sound system, I kind of enjoyed it.

Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter is now screening in cinemas nationwide.