Blood Red Sky is a new German language film released through Netflix on July 23rd 2021. The movie is about a mother, Nadja, and her pre-teen son, Elias, traveling on a red-eye flight from Europe to New York. Nadja is going to the USA for a medical procedure. The voyage is interrupted when the flight is highjacked by a group of armed men. What the highjackers don’t know is that Nadja is secretly a vampire. She hides in the cargo section of the plane and begins killing them one by one in an effort to rescue her son and the other passengers.
As this is a vampire film one’s first thought might be that it is a horror movie. That’s not really the case. By making the vampire the protagonist, Blood Red Sky, is somewhat of a genre-bender. I feel like it has more in common with the thriller genre than the horror genre. Blood Red Sky is quite similar to Liam Neeson’s The Commuter as the action is restricted to a single vehicle that remains in motion for most of the movie.
Probably the biggest reason to place Blood Red Sky in the horror genre pile would be the gore. There is a lot of blood and guts in the movie. Nothing out of the ordinary for a vampire movie. Tasteful probably isn’t the right word, but its not just blood for the sake of blood (Looking at you Blade). The point of the film is to keep you on the edge of your seat, not have you recoiling in disgust. This is a vampire thriller, not a vampire slasher.
The script and editing for the movie keep the tension high throughout. There are occasional breaks in the action to reveal more of Nadja and Elias’s lives before they board the plane. Even these scenes are filled with finger-biting tension, but it serves as a good action break for the main highjacking plot of the movie.
I watched the movie as an English dub. In retrospect that was probably a mistake. I don’t know if the voice acting was done by the same actors who delivered their German lines, but there were a few deliveries that were noticeably weaker than the others. The voice actors for Elias and Farid, a friendly passenger, are notably bad. Nadja and Berg, the leader of the highjackers were great. Nothing terribly unusual for dubbed animation performances, but something to be wary of. If I were to rewatch the movie I would do it in German with subtitles instead of with the English dub.
I thoroughly enjoyed Blood Red Sky. It was probably one of the best new movies I’ve seen this year and would remain that way even if this wasn’t such a weird year for cinema. If you like thrillers or vampires and can handle a lot of blood on screen, I’d recommend it. Like I said, it’s available on Netflix.
