“Blood Red Sky” on Netflix: Mom has sharp teeth. – Culture

When you are bitten by a vampire as a young mother, there are of course some logistical challenges. It starts with the bedroom furnishings: baby cot or double coffin? And the right diet? Complementary foods or blood products? And then there is the problem with the daycare center: Can you hand over the little ones before sunrise?

Admittedly, such questions are rather rare, but the German director Peter Thorwarth has dealt with them nonetheless. In his Netflix film “Blood Red Sky” he tells of a single vampire mom with a son. Nadja (Peri Baumeister) keeps her thirst for blood at bay with syringes and only occasionally licks the schnitzel blood out of the supermarket styrofoam bowl. Together with her ten-year-old Elias (Carl Anton Koch) she wants to take a night flight to New York. There a doctor is supposed to “make her well,” as the boy explains to another passenger. Vampirism as a blood disease that can be treated and maybe even cured? This is not a completely new, but reasonably original approach to revive the worn-out vampire film genre, to get it away from all the splatter orgies and monster movies, from the sex films or maiden gobs à la “Twilight”.

The story of this film fits on a beer mat, but that is a quality feature at Netflix

But then the terrorists come. And with them, Nadja’s blood washing appointment in New York is a long way off. Because “Blood Red Sky” is not only a vampire film and mom drama, but also a kidnapping crime thriller, terror thriller and action spectacle. It even contains trace elements from the superhero film: Because Nadja is “gifted and cursed” at the same time, as one would say in Hollywood, so she has special powers that make her a cursed outsider. But their hour comes when Arab terrorists take control of the plane, force it to turn back and shoot passengers at random. Then the vampire sharpens her senses, takes out the dentures and bites hard. What sounds like a good slaughter, it is; the audience gets what they expect: bloodsuckers and bad boys fight in the confines of an airplane.

Such ideas that fit on a beer mat are also well received in Hollywood, where people like to set different opponents against each other. It has almost become a genre of its own: Aliens against zombies, spider men against sandmen, giant monkeys against monster lizards. So it came about that a US studio got involved early on in this project by Peter Thorwarth and his co-author Stefan Holtz. The two met at the Munich Film School and worked together on blockbuster hits like “Bang Boom Bang” or “Not My Day”.

Open detailed view

But despite participating in the studio, nothing came of the film, the first version of the script was written 15 years ago, and the makers were caught between two stools for a long time. The project was too expensive and genre-heavy for German cinema, but with international partners it would probably have been a direct-to-video production. But times have changed, there are streaming services. That was also the salvation for this film, which otherwise would probably never have been made. The producer Christian Becker, another friend of Thorwarth’s from Munich film college days, sold the terrorist-versus-bloodsucker film to Netflix. It was given a decent budget and had it adapted to the requirements of a global corporation. The cast is international, diverse and multilingual, which makes perfect sense in a film about a long-haul flight.

The mix of different genres is also nothing unusual in the streaming age, even the thing with the single vampire mom works: Although Nadja sucks blood vigorously and becomes more and more a Nosferatu-like creature, she is still a mother who cares for her Son cares. The interspersed flashbacks are intended to give emotional depth, even if they slow down the narrative and take away some of the hermetic force of the film. The many turns and plot twists are not always logical, but surprising. Thorwarth’s film seems quite constructed, but almost perfectly meets all the requirements of a modern streaming production.

Blood Red Sky, D / USA 2021 – Director: Peter Thorwarth. With: Peri Baumeister, Alexander Scheer, Dominic Purcell, 121 minutes, Netflix.