A gloomy helping of Dracula and gore

 

Sailors aren't the only victims in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a movie based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Hope dies, as well. I'm talking about the hope for a movie that might have become a worthy addition to cinema's voluminous vampire library. What we get instead is a heaping helping of portentous drama. Noisy and boring, Last Voyage deprives Dracula of any twisted charm, turning him into a ravenous beast with exceptionally bad teeth. The trailer offers a glimpse of what Dracula looks like when in full vampiric bloom. Early on, we learn that Dracula has organized a voyage in which he will be shipped from Transylvania to London in a crate big enough to hold a refrigerator. Director Andre Ovredal makes it clear from the start that he's after a tale that reeks of foreboding. Most of the story takes place on the Demeter, where we meet the ship's doctor (Corey Hawkins), the ship's captain (Liam Cunningham), and the dour first mate (David Dastmalchian). As crew members succumb to Dracula, the filmmakers display a fair measure of fleshy gore. Toby (Woody Norman), the captain's grandson, is also on board. Although the movie is short on suspense, we wonder how far the filmmakers will go. Will young Toby wind up as vampire food? A woman (Aisling Franciosi) is found in one of the 50 crates that have been stowed in the Demeter's hold. She knows how relentless Dracula can be. The filmmakers seem to be striving for symphonic swells of terror as the sailors face a terrible evil. But atmospherics can carry a movie only so far and The Last Voyage of the Demeter sinks under the weight of its unrelieved gloom.

Exploring the making of a fascist

Actor Brady Corbet sets his strangely evocative movie at the end of World War I.

The Childhood of a Leader immerses itself in a volatile moment in history without trying to replicate it.

Instead of recounting real events at the end of World War I, first time director Brady Corbet takes a highly interpretive look at the conditions that might give rise to a fascist totalitarian leader. To accomplish this task, Corbet focuses on Prescott (Tom Sweet), a boy who's living outside of Paris with his parents, a German mother of chilly disposition (Berenice Bejo) and an American diplomat father (Liam Cunningham) who's working on the Treaty of Versailles for President Wilson.

Corbet divides his slowly evolving tale into three chapters titled Tantrums 1,2 and 3.

It's worth pausing to consider these titles as we watch an often unpleasant boy react to a harsh and loveless world that's full of disquiet. It's almost as if Corbet, who co-wrote the screenplay with Norwegian actress Mona Fastvoid, wants to tell us that authoritarian leadership amounts to a kind of sustained tantrum, an unleashing of puerile anger from a dictator who believes the world deserves to be smashed and brutalized.

Much of the movie's discordant feeling derives from an avant-garde score by Scott Walker.
Nowhere is Walker's influence more evident than in opening newsreel footage that serves as a prologue for what's to follow. The black-and-white images of diplomats gathering in Paris to determine the shape of Interwar Europe are accompanied by a soundtrack that might be suitable for a horror movie. And, in some ways, The Childhood of a Leader is a horror movie. Corbet turns over the soil in which bad seeds can grow.

We first see young Prescott through a window at night. Dressed as an angel, he's about to participate in a Christmas pageant at the local church. No sooner has the pageant ended, than Prescott races into the woods, finds a perch and begins throwing rocks at the local priest.

Other adults in Prescott's world include a tutor (Stacy Martin) and a maid (Yolanda Moreau). Only the maid demonstrates anything resembling affection for the boy.

At times, Prescott -- with long locks that his mother refuses to trim -- is taken for a girl. His mother won't let him be a boy, which signals trouble for his pending manhood.

Robert Pattinson does cameo duty as a journalist who has periodic discussions with Cunningham's character and who may be a secret lover of Bejo's character.

Corbett infuses his dimly lit movie with a sense of dread as he allows scenes to play out in often-ambiguous fashion. By no means an inviting movie, The Childhood of a Leader can seem unremittingly harsh, even forbidding.

The Childhood of a Leader, which takes its title and perhaps some inspiration from a 1939 short story by Jean Paul Sartre, has been compared to the austere work of Austrian director Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon). Corbet, who acted in Haneke's American version of Funny Games, obviously knows the director's work.

Wherever Corbet finds his influences, it's clear that he wants to speak in his own voice as he explores the murky origins of fascism. And if we're uncertain about his intentions, Corbet emphasizes the point with an eerie postscript, a brief look at the trappings of a fictional fascist state in which the now-grown leader has ascended.

It's possible to argue that Corbet leaves too much unstated in his depictions of daily life or that he moves too slowly. And, yes, watching The Childhood of a Leader requires patience, but Corbet deserves credit for imbuing his movie with an unquestionable seriousness of purpose. He makes you want to probe its mysteries.