WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Netflix’s Blood Red Sky, available now on Netflix.
In Netflix’s Blood Red Sky, Elias and his mother, Nadja, fly are flying from Germany to New York so that she can see a specialist and get help for her blood disorder. Mid-flight, however, a group of people hijacks the plane, and Nadja is forced to reveal the true nature of her disorder in order to save her son. The long and the short of it is that Nadja is a vampire, and as is true of movies like this, she has to die by the end. However, Blood Red Sky breaks the mold by making Nadja’s death unexpectedly heartbreaking.
When the movie starts, Trans-Atlantic 473 touches down at a RAF airbase in Scotland. But it’s not the pilot flying --it's a single, injured passenger who makes contact with air traffic control and lands the plane as instructed. Shortly after, a young boy climbs down from an open door in the cargo hold, but no one else emerges. Not without reason, the Scottish military personnel believe that the hijackers are still alive and holding the passenger’s captive, but they can't be more wrong because, by that point, everyone on the plane was a vampire.
Throughout Blood Red Sky, viewers see what begins as a normal flight devolve into absolute and utter chaos. Some of the crew is in on the hijacking, and they easily kill the air marshals and take over the flight. While the passengers are being held hostage, Elias makes a break for it and hides in the cargo hold, but when his mother goes to retrieve him, she's shot. In order to survive, she goes below and drinks the blood of a dog and one of the hijackers. Nadja knows that in order to save her son, she will have to reveal her true, vampire nature and kill all of the hijackers.
And she's well on her way to succeeding until a particularly psychotic hijacker pins her with a blacklight flashlight, sedates her with her own medication and takes some of her blood. Then, to Nadja’s horror, the hijacker injects himself and becomes just like her -- cursed to drink blood. Chaos then ensues as he turns everyone on the plane into vampires. There were a few failed attempts to stop him, but by the time the plane lands in Scotland, everyone -- save the passenger locked on the flight deck and Elias -- is dead ready to drink blood.
The ending from that point is fairly obvious -- explosives the hijackers rigged earlier in the movie have to go off in order to save the world from an infestation of newly-turned vampires -- but how it happens is unexpected. After escaping the plane, he avoids the doctors that are trying to take him from a hospital and realizes the vampires are about to make their grand entrance. But before he can react, his mother jumps from the plane and starts to rush at him.
Throughout the movie, it's clear that Elias knows about his mother’s secret, and he does all kinds of simple things to help her, including checking into the airport alone so that his mother can avoid the sun and calling her doctor to secure additional medication. It's clear that he was never afraid of his mother's condition, and on the flip side, Nadja did everything in her power to protect her son. Even when she lets her true self emerge, she is only doing it to save him from the hijackers. However, by the end of the movie, she knows that she is too far gone and cannot control herself, which forces her to push her sun away.
At the point when she jumps from the plane, Elias knows his mother is long gone, and that he must kill her and the other vampires. In an otherwise predictable movie, the ending hits with an emotional heft as Elias is the one forced to detonate the explosives and kill his mother. He wanted nothing more than to help her, and that’s exactly why he had to end her suffering.
To see Elias' struggle to survive a hoard of vampires, Blood Red Sky is streaming now on Netflix.
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