Year of Release: 2021
Director: Peter Thorwarth
Starring: Peri Baumeister, Carl Anton Koch, Alexander Scheel, Kais Setti, Gordon Brown, Dominic Purcell, Graham McTavish, Kai Ivo Baulitz, Roland Moller, Chidi Ajufo, Jan Loukota, Nader Ben-Abdallah, Leonie Brill, Rutger Lysen, Rainer Reiners, Ilona Schulz
Genre: Action, Horror, Drama
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 2
Watch it on Netflix
Synopsis and Review
Another release from Netflix, this time around a German film from director Peter Thorwarth, who has directed previous action films and also music videos. The narrative follows the story of Nadja who is traveling with her son Elias to the US. As we find out throughout the narrative, her ailment turns out to be a form of vampirism, since while out and about with her husband and her toddler, and due to a car problem which rendered them unable to move, her husband is killed by what Nadja soon discovers to be a vampire. She herself manages to kill the creature who killed her husband, but in the process is hurt by the vampire, and therefore carries the virus in her, which forces her to start desiring blood constantly. As Nadja and Elias start their journey across the Atlantic, the plane is highjacked by a group, who plans on blowing it up, while escaping with some parachutes into a position that has been previously arranged. While that is the initial plan, some of the highjacking team members get very violent, very soon, shooting Nadja in the process and terrorizing Elias. Nadja due to her condition manages to quickly recover and sets out to thwart their plans and protect Elias above all.
"Blood Red Sky" has the workings to be a suspenseful B-movie, mixing influences which range from Robert Schwentke's "Flightplan", David R. Ellis' "Snakes on a Plane", to Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk Till Dawn". Sadly it truly never capitalizes on these inspirations and soon becomes bogged down by action set pieces that are not that exciting, and characters that are not well developed. The script goes all in when it comes to describing the villains of the narrative as broadly and as generically as possibly, but tries to bring some dimension to the central motherly figure personified by Nadja, though it never really explains much about what she does, or did for that matter, what was her life like or even what her vampirism has been about and in what way has it impacted her life (aside from the "medication" she takes). And while all those plot points could have been quickly summarized, had the script approached an economical stance on what makes Nadja a ferocious protector (a vampire version of Zoe Saldana's character in Olivier Megaton's "Colombiana" for instance), it could have taken the narrative in a much more exciting direction, playing with the claustrophobic environment and the fact that Nadja herself could in turn be the danger to them all. Instead the narrative becomes this mix/hybrid of multiple styles that never truly marry well together, namely a drama of a mother who wants to get better and save her child, mixed with a horror film where she's a blood thirsty monster who refuses to let that thirst win, until another evil reveals itself. The characters sadly are not memorable, including the expected villains whose motivations and actions are equally all over the place. In the end it's an unsatisfying film, one that tries to fiddle with genres but that doesn't really know how to properly tell a simple story with a point of view. The cast, with the exception of the always charismatic Graham McTavish, is forgettable, as is the production values. It's ultimately a mediocre endeavor.
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