The Last Voyage Of The Demeter doesn’t raise the stakes enough.

There’s a simple, primal appeal to The Last Voyage of the Demeter. A single location, a creeping sense of doom, and a monster slowly picking off an isolated crew – it’s practically Alien at sea, but with Dracula instead of a xenomorph. The film takes the brief, terrifying journey from Romania to England aboard the Demeter and reframes it in the mould of Alien’s “haunted house in space” formula, setting it afloat on the open sea. But what should be a slam-dunk concept instead sails headlong into choppy waters, foundering somewhere between atmospheric horror and its oddly detached, lethargic approach to its own premise.

Adapted from the infamous “Captain’s Log” chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the film expands what was a hauntingly brief account of a doomed voyage into a full-fledged survival horror piece. The Demeter, a merchant ship carrying mysterious cargo from Transylvania to England, is stalked by a feral, bat-like Dracula (Javier Botet, no stranger to monstrous physicality). Each night, the unseen predator picks off the crew one by one, leaving a dwindling band of survivors to fight a battle they can’t possibly win. The comparison to Alien is striking: the ship becomes a tomb, the crew turns into doomed survivors, and Dracula, like the xenomorph, is a relentless, unknowable terror lurking in the shadows.

There’s a lot to admire in the way the film approaches its material. The production design is impeccable, creating a convincingly grimy, claustrophobic ship where darkness and fog press in from all sides. The cinematography leans into murky shadows and flickering lamplight, capturing a world that feels authentically damp and miserable. There’s a genuine effort to tell a gothic horror story rather than a slick action-horror spectacle, and for that alone, it deserves credit.

Yet, for all its attention to setting and tone, the film struggles to find a compelling pulse. The script, stretched out from what was essentially a found-footage horror vignette in Stoker’s novel, never quite builds the momentum it needs. Corey Hawkins leads the cast as Clemens, a doctor who finds himself among the crew, and while he makes for a sympathetic protagonist, the characters around him are thinly drawn and that’s where the comparisons to Alien start to break down. Instead of the Nostromo’s richly textured crew, we have interchangable vampire kibble instead. Even Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchian, usually reliably iconic presences, feel adrift playing the gruff but noble captain and his first officer, while Aisling Franciosi has little to work with beyond looking tormented as Anna, a stowaway with key knowledge about the supernatural threat. Their interactions feel oddly distant, lacking the kind of desperate camaraderie that should come from being trapped aboard a floating tomb.

Then there’s The Last Voyage Of The Demeter‘s Dracula himself. Rather than a cunning, seductive force of evil, this version is a pure beast – more Nosferatu than Bela Lugosi. That’s not inherently a bad approach, but it renders him a surprisingly generic threat. He’s a monster, certainly, but not a particularly interesting one. Without the layers of intelligence and sadism that define Dracula in other adaptations, he becomes just another movie creature skulking in the dark, more akin to Jeepers Creepers than Horror of Dracula. His appearances are well-staged, and Botet’s physicality is unnerving, but the film rarely lets him become more than a looming silhouette until the final act.

For a film so rich in ominous foreshadowing, it also lacks the kind of gut-punch inevitability that made the source material so haunting. There are moments of real tension – a sequence involving a burning ship’s wheel is particularly striking – but the pacing drags, and the scares feel oddly spaced out, with too much time spent brooding over the impending doom rather than letting that doom play out in an escalating fashion. By the time the film reaches its climax, it lands with the grim thud of an outcome that never felt in doubt, but without the sense of tragic grandeur it seems to be aiming for.

It’s frustrating because The Last Voyage of the Demeter clearly wants to be an old-fashioned, slow-burn horror film and in an era where horror often leans on jumpscares and meta-humour, its commitment to a classic, creeping dread should be commendable. And yet, it never quite makes full use of its own premise. The film’s best aspects – its atmosphere, its setting, its concept – are stranded in a script that doesn’t generate enough tension or character depth to make the voyage feel truly harrowing or justify the sequel-baiting coda.

As a curio, it’s worth a watch, particularly for Dracula fans who appreciate a moody, maritime take on the prince of darkness. But much like the ill-fated ship of its title, it’s destined to fail to reach its destination.