BLOOD RED SKY (2021 - German)

Studio:      Netflix
Director:    Peter Thorwarth
Writer:      Peter Thorwarth, Stefan Holtz
Producer:  Benjamin Munz, Christian Becker
Stars:     Peri Baumeister, Alexander Scheer, Kais Setti, Carl Koch, Gordon Brown, Roland Moller, Chidi Ajufo, Kai Ivo Baulitz, Graham McTavish, Dominic Purcell

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Terrorists hijack an airplane, but passengers face another unexpected threat when a vampire is also discovered onboard.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After their car breaks down on a snowy road, Nikolai leaves his wife Nadja and their newborn son Elias in the vehicle while he looks for help. When Nikolai fails to return, Nadja follows his path to a remote woodland home where she finds her husband dead in the basement. A feral vampire bites Nadja, although she manages to kill the creature.

Struggling as a single mother also dealing with newfound bloodlust, Nadja later returns to the remote home in search of answers regarding her affliction. The vampire’s elderly father confronts Nadja with a warning about her curse. Nadja slays the man after he tries to kill her. She then steals his supply of injections that quell her hunger and burns down his house.

With the drug becoming increasingly less useful for preventing her transformations as the years go on, Nadja and Elias board a nighttime flight from Germany to New York to visit a doctor for a blood transfusion. Before boarding, Elias befriends fellow passenger Farid, a Muslim physicist, in the airport terminal.

Once the plane is in the air, Berg and his terrorist team of Eightball, co-pilot Bastian Buchner, Karl, Curtiz, and Jurij violently hijack the aircraft. As part of their plan to manipulate the stock market by crashing the plane into London, the terrorists force Farid and another Muslim passenger, Mohammed, to record confessions that frame them for the crime.

Against his mother’s warning, Elias makes a break for the cargo hold to hide. Nadja runs after him. Eightball shoots Nadja and she seemingly drops dead in the galley. Elias is returned to his seat to be comforted by Farid.

Nadja begins transforming into a feral vampire. Nadja hides in the cargo hold where she feeds on Jurij before sneaking back to Elias in the cabin. Meanwhile, Berg’s team puts the plane on autopilot and prepares to parachute from the lower deck.

Worried that the diverted flight path will now expose her to sunlight, Nadja takes Elias to the cabin to turn the plane around. Upon finding the pilot dead, Nadja recruits Mohammed, who has a background in aerospace engineering, to fly the plane.

The terrorists realize Nadja is still alive when they find Jurij slaughtered. Nadja bars the cockpit door to keep the terrorists from coming back for her. However, Berg executes a passenger and threatens to murder more until Nadja opens the door.

Having fully transformed into a feral creature, Nadja exits the cockpit and kills Berg. Realizing Nadja is a vampire, Eightball retreats to the cargo hold with Bastian, Karl, and Curtiz.

Eightball uses an ultraviolet flashlight to subdue Nadja. He then uses a syringe to draw blood from Nadja’s arm. Elias recovers Berg’s handgun, which he uses to stop Eightball from staking his mother. Eightball grabs the weapon. A wild gunshot takes out a window, causing a sudden pressure change that panics the passengers. Mohammed suffocates to death in the cockpit.

Nadja wounds Eightball with the gun, but he escapes during the commotion. Curtiz and Bastian retake the cockpit. Nadja gives Elias to Farid so she can go after Eightball.

Eightball hides from Nadja inside a bulletproof car in the cargo hold. Eightball then injects himself with Nadja’s blood to transform into a vampire. Remembering the old man’s warning about stopping the curse’s spread, Nadja sets the car on fire.

Between the pressure loss, fire, and vampire on the loose, chaos consumes the passengers, many of whom mobilize to kill Nadja. During one struggle, Nadja bites Rainer Huber, a passenger who blames Nadja for the death of his wife Ingelore. Nadja nearly bites Farid too, but Elias stops her.

Having survived the car fire, Eightball slaughters Karl and transforms Curtiz. Eightball bites Farid’s hand when Farid and Nadja bar the cargo hold door to keep Eightball out of the cabin. Nadja amputates Farid’s arm to prevent infection.

Nadja and Farid force Bastian to divert the plane to an RAF airbase in Scotland. Meanwhile, Eightball gets loose and goes on a rampage that spreads vampirism among the passengers.

To prevent the vampires from escaping the airplane, Nadja volunteers to manually detonate the explosives planted by the terrorists. Before Nadja can act, Elias crawls through a narrow passageway to recover the remote detonator so his mother won’t have to sacrifice herself. Elias obtains the remote control, but becomes trapped by a vampire horde in the cargo hold.

After confirming Farid can land the plane alone, Nadja kills Bastian. Nadja then goes to the cargo hold to fight Eightball before he can get to Elias. Eightball overpowers Nadja, but Elias blows open the cargo hatch to disorient him. Nadja uses her remaining strength to push Eightball outside. However, Eightball grabs the doorframe and begins climbing back in.

From a camera monitor in the cockpit, Farid sees Elias in danger. Farid steers toward rising sunlight, causing Eightball to let go of the airplane and die.

Elias feeds his blood to his mother to help Nadja recover. However, Nadja senses that her feral side is dangerously close to fully consuming her humanity, so she recoils away from her son, leaving Elias distraught.

The plane lands at the airbase. Colonel Alan Drummond commands a military team that presumes Farid to be one of the terrorists despite Farid’s protestations to tell them what really happened. Elias is recovered from the plane, but Drummond and his team disbelieve the boy’s warning of vampires too.

While Elias is taken away in an ambulance, Drummond’s soldiers breach the airplane. Desperate to save his mother as well as Farid, Elias escapes custody with his teddy bear that hides the remote detonator. Farid is safely taken into custody while vampires besiege the rest of the soldiers.

Elias rushes back to the plane only to see that his mother fully transformed into a feral creature. Using the remote, Elias tearfully blows up the aircraft with all of the creatures inside. Astonished at the unbelievable carnage he witnessed, Drummond releases Farid to reunite with Elias.

---

Review:

In terms of attracting clicks, certain types of titles don’t perform as well as others here at Culture Crypt. Foreign films are the first factor. It’s true what they say; a lot of English-speaking audiences simply refuse to read subtitles. Whenever I cover a movie that’s in another language, the number of visitors for that review is guaranteed to take a hit.

Streaming movies, specifically those native to Netflix, have a particularly poor shelf life too. It’s the nature of their wispy marketing model. Netflix movies burn hot over the course of the first weekend or so. Then they drop from the front page of the app, promotional pushes evaporate, and everyone, viewers included, moves on to whatever fresh film takes its place as “flavor of the week.” Many of those movies never rise from their graves again, leaving my content to collect cobwebs since new people rarely rediscover forgotten flashes in the pan.

That put two strikes against “Blood Red Sky.” We can quibble over the technicality of it being a German film. Plenty of dialogue is in English, probably at least one-half and maybe as much as three-fourths. But there’s plenty in German too, which puts subtitles into play. Couple that with “Blood Red Sky” being on Netflix and the numbers-minded website proprietor in me couldn’t help but wonder, “Oh man, is anybody going to care about this one for more than a minute?”

Director/co-writer Peter Thorwarth and his producers probably thought the same thing. That might be why they sought a little outside assistance from Dominic Purcell and Graham McTavish, two actors mostly known for their television work, to attract eyes that wouldn’t be interested in a cast of unfamiliar German faces. The strategy worked. To be honest, their presence pushed me over the top in thinking people might actually give “Blood Red Sky” the time of day instead of dismissing it as “another foreign horror movie dumped to Netflix.”

Purcell and McTavish only appear in supporting parts. Although “Blood Red Sky” could easily do without them, they’re not totally negligible by any means. Part of me remains suspicious about whether their roles existed in the original outline though. Purcell plays a terrorist cell leader who turns out to not be the main villain. McTavish briefly shows up in bookending bits as a grizzled military man. Their scenes carry a whiff of having been worked in after the fact, not necessarily through editing, but maybe via rewrite. The thing is, “Blood Red Sky” weaves its various characters and timelines together so seamlessly, it’s impossible to be certain if they were.

Two separate agendas create complications for each other in “Blood Red Sky.” Accompanied by her young son Elias, Nadja boards a transatlantic flight with the hope of having her unusual affliction cured by an experimental blood transfusion in New York. Also onboard are Berg, Eightball, and a bevy of disguised terrorists determined to hijack the airplane. Under ordinary circumstances, they’d pose the greatest threat to the passengers. But Nadja isn’t ordinary. She’s a vampire, and her hunger is growing harder and harder to keep under control.

One of “Blood Red Sky’s” strengths, and it has several, lies in how slickly it slides through common cinematic conventions. I’ll give two examples.

“Blood Red Sky” starts at the end of its story. Normally used as a cheat when a boring buildup desperately needs to begin with a bang, this tired tactic usually ends up suffocating suspense by giving away key information about who lives, who dies, etc. “Blood Red Sky” sort of does the same thing, except I never found myself looking back to the beginning and remembering, “Oh, the little boy is going to survive.” He’s a little boy. Of course he’s going to make it. “Blood Red Sky’s” prologue also cuts on a cliffhanger, so it puts plates in the back of your mind to keep spinning instead of prematurely exposing something you otherwise wouldn’t have seen coming. In other words, “Blood Red Sky” gets away with this trick by not showing the audience exactly what’s up its sleeve.

Another thing that ordinarily makes my eyes roll is when a movie with multiple lines of simultaneous action can’t come close to juggling all of its bowling pins efficiently. Sometimes you’ll see characters inexplicably disappear for inordinate amounts of time so a scene can focus solely on someone else. Other times, a location like a house will grow to an impossible size where people somehow don’t cross paths or don’t notice major commotions because the writers couldn’t lay out logical logistics.

Once again, “Blood Red Sky” kind of does both of those things, except its stalling tactics don’t call the same amount of attention to themselves. Even in instances where I noticed it seemed like the terrorists were conveniently offscreen for long periods, I was able to reason, “Well, it could make sense that they’re busy in the cargo hold prepping their parachutes or whatever.” “Blood Red Sky” moves with such fluidity and has so much going on at any given moment, there aren’t many opportunities to get hung up on trivialities like there are with barebones plots featuring fewer players.

In addition to bookends basically making the movie a flashback, “Blood Red Sky” reaches even further into the past with scattered memories that gradually reveal how Nadja acquired her curse. I have a tough time recalling another recent film that picked better positions for placing its “XX Years Earlier” scenes. Sequences that show Nadja dealing with her newfound bloodlust nestle into natural pauses in the current timeline so as to not be jarring. Often, they’re thematically relevant to present day parallels too, and the context they add enhances our understanding of how the story unfolds in two directions at once. We’re not talking “Memento” levels of nonlinear storytelling, but rarely do you see a relatively straightforward plot enhanced this adeptly with non-chronological arrangements.

When you consider how deceptively simple the summary of “terrorists clash with vampires aboard an airplane” is, the only remaining obstacle to “Blood Red Sky’s” attractiveness is its two-hour runtime. I wouldn’t say the movie contains unnecessary padding. It uses every minute it has. “Blood Red Sky” just doesn’t need to shoot all of the scenes as scripted. Judicious cuts to redundant back-and-forths and miscellaneous running around would do wonders for improving the rhythm.

Then again, part of the reason “Blood Red Sky” goes on as long as it does is due to the time it takes to establish personalities for the hijackers and for a few passengers. The top terrorist is a typical movie psycho, licking his lips with a hint of comic book kookiness like a weird cross between Patrick Bateman and Carson Kressley. Another terrorist has a standard “why do we have to kill anyone?” conscience. Those are pat characterizations for this brand of rodeo. At the same time, it would have been a copout to just plunk ‘Terrorist A’ and ‘Passenger B’ into the screenplay and call it a day, so the extra miles to flesh out the fiction dig out more depth.

It’s also welcome that they aren’t the usual hijackers either. They’re a mix of men who cleverly use xenophobia to divert suspicion off themselves when they’re mostly white, money-minded mercenaries trying to manipulate the stark market with a plane crash, not make a revolutionary political statement.

All in all, “Blood Red Sky” is straight-no-chaser hijacking action and vampire horror. There’s no cartoonish campiness or gags to laugh at, either intentionally or unintentionally. With a large airplane and what I assume is an actual airport terminal, immensely immersive locations sell the seriousness of the setting, ably aided by actors who don’t behave like they’re beneath themselves in a B-movie. Well, the main villain might be, but he has an excuse for adding an air of peculiarity as the exception to “Blood Red Sky’s” surprisingly realistic rule.

Just as surprisingly, “Blood Red Sky” turns into one of the more “human” vampire movies out there because it’s really about a single mother fighting against forces trying to turn her into a monster. Peri Baumeister is good as Nadja, but Carl Koch is even better as her son Elias. The bond between a movie mother and child hasn’t been this strong or this emotionally moving since “The Babadook” (review here). I’m not sure anyone expected “Blood Red Sky” to have such a heart-wrenching hook hiding at the center of blood, bullets, and bad guys. That’s the thing about judging books by their covers, so to speak. On the outside, “Blood Red Sky” might appear easy to pass over. What’s lurking inside proves doing so would be an unwise idea.

Review Score: 75

---