(SCREEN SCENE dinkus)
Blood Red Sky
Starring Peri Baumeister, Carl Anton Koch and Alexander Scheer
Rated MA15+
Blood Red Sky is a tense, compelling German horror-action film.
Nadja (Peri Baumeister), a mother and vampire, must protect her son Elias (Carl Anton Koch) when their plane is hijacked.
Vampires are traditionally depicted as seductive and/or masculine, so it’s rare to find a fictional vampire with a strong maternal instinct. Nadja’s love for Elias forms the film’s touching core, juxtaposing tenderness and fierce protectiveness with her increasingly monstrous appearance.
The film draws strong tension from solid internal and external conflict, as Nadja must contend with the hijackers, the growing number of vampires on the plane, distrust from the other passengers and her own savage impulses.
Baumeister does a great job playing a sympathetic character beneath her macabre makeup and animalistic twitches, Koch is one of the best child actors I’ve seen in a long time, and Alexander Scheer is a riveting scumbag as the psychopathic Eightball.
The film has some contrived moments and a couple of obnoxious supporting characters. The English-spoken scenes feel stiff compared to the mostly-German rest of the film, and like with Blood Vessel, another great vampire movie from last year, the action is grisly but poorly-shot.
While slightly rough around the edges, Blood Red Sky is a morbid but moving and well-paced horror-action film with a uniquely maternal monster, and is available for streaming on Netflix.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
