It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these on here, but we’ve got another preview screening to get through today (thanks again to StudioCanal for reaching out and letting me attend)… and this is an interesting one. After dealing with some Dracula fanfiction over the past twelve months, between the god-awful The Invitation and the pretty goddamn good Renfield, we now have a specific adaptation of the original Bram Stoker novel. More specifically, the chapter ‘The Captain’s Log’ which, in context to the rest of the book, is mainly just an interlude to explain Dracula shifting from one place to another so that the bigger story can continue.
That notion of highlighting and potentially elevating an ostensible footnote in the source material definitely fits with the artistic M.O. of director André Øvredal. Like with the last time we checked in on him, the adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, his approach to the tale of the ill-fated ship Demeter and its doomed voyage from Romania to London emphasises the nature of storytelling. The crew share their superstitions about patron saints of sailors blessing them with a safe voyage, women being bad luck to have on-board (actively questioned here by how said woman, Anna played by The Nightingale’s Aisling Franciosi, is the most consistently heroic of the entire cast), and the full-blown paranoia that ensues once the animals and later the crew start dropping dead from Dracula’s midnight snacking.
Also like with Scary Stories, it highlights how that tradition of shared storytelling often reveals both our brightest and darkest impulses and mindsets, with the utterly monstrous Dracula (given unnerving form by reliable creature actor Javier Botet) representing the utmost evil that can exist in our world. And the atmosphere offered by the film craft here adds a lot to that impression, from Roman Osin and Tom Stern’s claustrophobic cinematography to show how cramped the ship is, to the eerie sound design that brings out the creeping dread from every creaking floorboard and tapping of wood, to Bear McCreary once again proving that he never misses with horror soundtracks.
The cast is absolutely incredible as well. Corey Hawkins as Dr. Clemens serves as the balancing point for the film’s overall musings on the nature of evil, religious righteousness as its antithesis, and as the resident sceptic while also handling his share of bad-ass moments when he comes face-to-face with the monster. David Dastmalchian, who up to now has made his mark by being the oddball in just about any film he’s cast in, gets to dig into some real emotional catharsis when it gets to him talking about how much the ship means to him, not to mention showing the darker side of loyalty to one’s friends and kin. Liam Cunningham as the ship’s captain gets a really intense character arc as he comes to terms with what’s happening to his crew and to himself, while Woody Norman as his son Toby… wow, I was already impressed with this kid after seeing him in C’mon C’mon last year, but he does even better here as a realistic child on-screen who still has a good head on his shoulders.
Also, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point out Aussie actor Nikolai Nikolaeff as the resident hard-drinking Russian sailor Petrofsky. Whether he’s playing a Viking in Round The Twist, a Power Ranger in Jungle Fury, or a Russian gangster in the Netflix Daredevil series, I will never not be happy to see him working, and for as little screen-time as he ultimately gets, he leaves a definite impression here by the end.
However, for as much as I genuinely like and appreciate a lot of what’s going on here, I can’t say that I found this horror film to be particularly… scary? It’s certainly tense, and there’s some highly suspenseful moments throughout, but it never really crossed that threshold into making me nervous in my seat. Part of that, for me at least, might be because of how the film starts. From its various showings of people refusing to get on-board the ‘doomed’ ship, to the captain monologuing about how this is his last voyage with the Demeter, to the film opening with the crew being found shipwrecked and empty, to just the pop culture osmosis of the story itself as part of a larger narrative it’s as if the film was actively trying to suck out any attempts at suspense by making it abundantly clear that no-one was going to survive this. I mean, yeah, that’s usually the case in horror films, but they don’t usually feel like they’re beating me over the head with that fact right from the start.
But that irritation doesn’t stick around nearly long enough to detract from what the movie gets right, though. While its lack of outright scares is a bit iffy, the atmosphere combined with the compelling performances do a lot to pick up the slack. It may make the ultimate fate of the characters an afterthought, but it still puts the effort into making the audience care about the characters and what may or may not happen to them. The cast even manage to properly drive home the ultimate message of the film (as thin as it is, coming from the writers of the similarly-thin Samaritan and Bullet Train) about the world, the people in it, and their capacity for great horror and great beauty in equal measure. I can’t say that I like this as much as the more novel approach to the source material in Renfield, but for a sea-faring creature feature, it gets all the important parts right and is quite entertaining when all is said and bitten into.
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