The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
Directed by André Øvredal
No — The Last Voyage of the Demeter is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes the most famous few pages of Bram Stoker's novel, the captain's log of a ship that arrives in England with no living crew, and stretches them into two hours of fog, blood, and creaking timber.
Consciousness Markers
A period horror piece set in 1897 casts Corey Hawkins, a Black actor, as the Cambridge-educated lead Clemens, alongside a notably multiethnic crew including Jon Jon Briones as Joseph, though the film never comments on this.
Anna is given a measure of agency as a survivor who strikes back at Dracula and chooses self-immolation over monstrosity, but the film offers no feminist thesis.
Clemens is an educated outsider among the crew, but the film never engages race as a subject or theme.
The film is a straightforward creature-feature with no preachy messaging or moralizing.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the voyage.
No environmental or climate themes are present in this vampire-at-sea tale.
The cargo is a coffin, not a critique of capital; no economic messaging appears.
No body-positivity themes; the film's bodies are largely victims and monsters.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
It expands a chapter of Stoker's novel rather than revising history for ideological ends.
Why it received this score
The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes the most famous few pages of Bram Stoker's novel, the captain's log of a ship that arrives in England with no living crew, and stretches them into two hours of fog, blood, and creaking timber. It is a handsome production. The candlelight is lovely. Dracula, played by Javier Botet beneath four hours of prosthetic application, is a scuttling thing that hangs from the rigging like a bat with a grudge.
The film casts Corey Hawkins, a Black actor, as Clemens, a Cambridge-educated doctor who boards the Demeter in Varna and spends the voyage performing blood transfusions on a stowaway. The crew around him is notably mixed, with Jon Jon Briones as the ship's cook. None of this is ever mentioned. The film has no interest in what a Black physician in 1897 might have met at a Bulgarian dock, and it does not pretend otherwise. This is representation by casting alone, which is to say it counts for something and argues for nothing. Aisling Franciosi's Anna gets the closest thing to an arc. She survives Dracula's bite, advises the crew, swings an axe, and finally chooses the sunrise over becoming what bit her. It is a tidy bit of agency, delivered without a thesis.
The rest of the ledger is bare. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of shipping magnates, no body-positive reading of the vampire's form, no neurodivergent crewman, no rewriting of history for present purposes. A creature feature that only wants to eat has little time for instruction, and this one keeps its moralizing to a minimum. The film wants to frighten us, and it does so with a straight face and a mean streak. That is not nothing. It is also not a message.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
The crew of the merchant ship Demeter attempts to survive the ocean voyage from Carpathia to London as they are stalked each night by a merciless presence onboard the ship.
Questions about The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Is The Last Voyage of the Demeter woke?
No — The Last Voyage of the Demeter is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does The Last Voyage of the Demeter have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (45). On Representation Casting: A period horror piece set in 1897 casts Corey Hawkins, a Black actor, as the Cambridge-educated lead Clemens, alongside a notably multiethnic crew including Jon Jon Briones as Joseph, though the film never comments on this.
How does The Last Voyage of the Demeter compare to other 2023 movies?
It ranks #83 of the 200 films from 2023 we've scored; their average is 24. The wokest is Origin (84).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.