The merchant ship Demeter sets sail from Carpathia to London, carrying with it a new crew member named Clemens (Corey Hawkins), an apparent stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi), and a mysterious cargo – the content of which is likely to murder everybody on board.

The Demeter is, of course, the ill-fated cargo ship that transports Dracula from Transylvania to England in Bram Stoker’s classic novel. There are countless films that adapt novels to the screen; it is much rarer for a film to adapt chapter 7 of a novel. It is a premise that largely works, since the characters involved are for the most part not present in any other part of the novel, but it is also a premise with some problems, since anybody who has read the book knows that everybody on board are dead by the time of the ship’s arrival onshore. Certainly this is true of any adaptation of classic literature, but for some reason the foregone conclusion feels more of a problem when the source material is so to-the-point and slight.

What writers Bragi Schut Jr and Zak Olkewicz do to overcome these issues is actually pretty smart. Their film may be set in 1897 on a sailing vessel, and it may adapt 19th century literature, but at the end of the day The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a pastiche of Ridley Scott’s Alien. There is the cargo ship, the unwanted terror hiding onboard, and the crew getting picked off one by one as they collectively fail to track down and eliminate the threat. There even seems to be either a knowing nod or a weird coincidence in having a medical officer named Clemens (played by Corey Hawkins here, and by Charles Dance in Alien³).

André Øvredal directs the film with a good sense of atmosphere and menace, and to the film’s credit it offs its characters in slightly surprising and confronting ways. Common wisdom of popular film, for example, is that the dog will always be safe. It’s refreshing to find a work where that is not necessarily the case. Bear McCreary provides a suitable moody, horror-infused musical score.

The film also benefits from a particularly talented cast, that avoids including an A-list star but which is populated with some immediately recognisable and effective actors. Corey Hawkins is a strong viewpoint character as Clemens, and is well supported by the likes of David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil), Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), and Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale).

Øvredal has directed an enjoyable movie here, inspired by literature but infused with a pulp sensibility. Its achievement is not so much in originality, but in the manner in which it blends adaptation with genre stereotype. It is an enjoyable fusion, and a very capable slice of pop entertainment.