Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blood Red Sky’ on Netflix, a Euro-Thriller That Puts Something More Dangerous on a Plane Than Snakes

Netflix’s 2021 original-movie blitz keeps on blitzing with Blood Red Sky, a Euro horror-suspense-action-thriller that very much earns all of those hyphens. The trailer kind of lets the premise cat out of the movie’s bag by revealing the nature of the lead character, so I’m gonna try to step gingerly around the spoiler landmines and maybe not reveal that — because this is definitely a movie that’s more rewarding if you go in cold.

BLOOD RED SKY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: RAF AIRBASE, SCOTLAND: Military officials guide a passenger jet out of the air for a bumpy landing. They’re carrying lots of guns and tactical gear, so it must be a hijacking situation. They train snipers on the cockpit. The cargo door opens and a little boy, Elias (Carl Anton Koch) climbs down, clutching a teddy bear. A counselor sits him down and asks what’s going on. He just stares into the middle distance. She’s not going to get anything from him, but we will, the privileged movie-watchers. Flashback to yesterday: Elias’ mom, Nadja (Peri Baumeister), pulls a wig on her bald head and grabs her medication. She fills a hypodermic needle with fluid, glugs down what’s left of the bottle, then injects the rest. The cancer must be pretty bad then, eh?

She and Elias are taking an evening flight to New York. At the airport, he chats with a kind man, Farid (Kais Setti), telling him his mom is going to get new bone marrow, and explains how their flight guarantees they leave at night and land at night. Are these important details? PROBABLY. We spend a little time in Nadja’s head via a flashback within the flashback: She and baby Elias and his father are traveling down a snowy rural road when the car breaks down. There’s no cell service, of course. Dad says he’ll go get help, but after a while, he doesn’t return. She wraps up the kid and follows Dad’s tracks to an abandoned house. There’s blood splattered in the snow. And a strange man who seems to be snarling like a wounded tiger. Curious.

Back on the airplane, shit starts going down. A handful of zealots take control of the plane, and an increasingly tiresome one dubbed Eightball (Alexander Scheer) jams his knife right into the eye socket of the flight marshal then terrorizes the passengers, his face and hands splattered with blood. So he’s fun, but that’s just the first of many damn things after another happening on this flight, because the terrorists make everyone stay in their seats but Elias runs off and Nadja follows him and ends up taking a few bullets, but after a bit, she seems to be kind of OK where most of us would be dead as a doorknocker. Also curious. Perhaps by having Nadja on the plane, they let the right one in.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You’ve got your Jodie Foster vehicle Flight Plan, your Liam Neeson vehicle Non-Stop and your Wesley Snipes vehicle Passenger 57, plus your Joseph Gordon-Levitt cockpit-only vehicle 7500. Plus the movie I referenced earlier which is a not particularly subtle dance around a possible spoiler you probably already saw in the trailer.

Performance Worth Watching: I’ll just say that Baumeister really keeps this move from flying apart by digging into her character’s maternal instinct and holding herself together in amazing ways.

Memorable Dialogue: Farid: She doesn’t have leukemia!

Elias: I never said that.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Trailers suck; hopefully you avoided it. The hard left the plot takes at roughly the end of the first act is a doozy, director/co-writer Peter Thorwarth using a little misdirection to set us up and nearly knock us over with a walloping reveal. From there, Blood Red Sky isn’t just another hostage drama at 30,000 feet, thankfully. But it is a cluttered assemblage of unnecessary flashbacks disrupting the rhythm of its nicely executed white-knuckly action.

The plot — well, it’s ramshackle, a fighter jet with more than a few holes in the fuselage. But we do care about the mother-son relationship at its core, because one can tame the other, which frequently requires the one putting themself in danger, thus making tense moments even more precarious, and there’s a point where the film fever-pitches until I involuntarily laughed to break the tension. So its bloody heart beats reasonably strong, and if Thorwarth strengthened his more clever ideas, honing the project down to its genre thrills and excising the half-assed mythology and commentary on racist stereotyping, we’d be watching a tighter, punchier picture. But as it is, it’s still good enough to elevate our heart rates.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Blood Red Sky is far from perfect, but it’s nonetheless entertaining and suspenseful.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Blood Red Sky on Netflix