With a title that bears all the hallmarks of the traditional vampire horror, Thorwarth's Blood Red Sky glides fearlessly towards a new cinematic realm, but does it manage to stay airborne?

Blood Red Sky is the story of Nadja, a widow and mother played by Peri Baumeister, and her sagacious son, Elias, played by Carl Anton Koch. 

Nadja plans to travel from her home in Germany to New York to seek treatment for an unrevealed illness that sees her physically struggle through the opening scenes and until shortly after Transatlantic 473 takes off.

Elias is quickly established as being wise beyond his years when he rolls a trolley of cases almost taller than he is up to the baggage drop-off by himself. A fellow passenger, Farid, played by Kais Setti, helps him lift the cases onto the conveyor and Elias later converses with him at the gate. 

This seemingly fleeting interaction becomes a much more profound connection as later events unravel. Meanwhile, in the airport's bathroom, Nadja injects herself with a substance that we can only assume is medication for her illness.

Their overnight flight is hijacked shortly after take-off and it is soon revealed that Nadja's mystery illness is that she is a vampire - a curse she uses as a survival skill in the dire situation she finds herself in. It turns out that the substance she was earlier seen injecting herself was, in fact, a suppressant for her vampiric tendencies.

Baumeister devotes herself to her role and masterfully combines vulnerability with primality - her motherly devotion grounds her roaring, raging inner beast, at least until shortly before the end. 

Her vampire self is far from an inhuman, unfeeling monster - she kills entirely discriminately and is able to distinguish with ease between those who are a threat and those who are not.

Kais Setti is also pretty touching as physicist Farid, a character whose decency and courage quickly become apparent. Elias is eventually entirely entrusted to Farid by Nadja, and the two form a bond that carries right through to the end.

The character development is one of Blood Red Sky's strongest points, even in the case of minor characters. Before take-off, an air steward encounters a demanding, misogynistic passenger in first class. 

When blood starts spurting and fangs begin flying here there and everywhere, the same passenger is heard begging a doctor on board to help him. "I'll pay you." he appeals to her, mortally wounded. This subtle but skillful display of the often common root of the "arsehole mentality" didn't go unnoticed.

The said garden-variety misogynistic moron, however, paled in comparison to Alexander Scheer's sociopathic air steward "Eightball". 

Without a leadership position amongst the hijackers and appearing to be held in contempt even by them, Eightball seems to have been brought on board purely for his capacity to commit flippant, indiscriminate acts of cruelty without a shred of hesitation. In this role, Scheer is convincingly, marvellously despicable.

His fellow hijackers, at least, seem on occasion to possess some moral standards, often appearing openly and audibly revolted by Eightball's flagrant sociopathy. 

In one scene, Dominic Purcell's character Berg, the lead hijacker, shakes his head when Eightball presents him with a child after Berg's demands that Eightball deliver to him a passenger to kill in the hopes of deterring Nadja from proceeding with her heroics. 

Fellow hijacker, Karl, played by Roland Møller is often heard referring to Eightball as a "psycho" as he struggles to reign in his colleague's indiscriminate vileness and cruelty.

Less impressive was the lengthy climax portion of the film - the roaring and tearing and ripping felt unnecessarily drawn out and to no greater end. 

One can't help feeling that the flashbacks that tell the story of how Nadja came to be a vampire were also unnecessary and that the narrative could have carried itself without them. Painfully long mid-sections can weaken even the best of plots and the strongest concepts.

Having said that, the vulnerable and committed performances of the leads, Baumeister and Koch, are what keeps us in our seats until the very end. 

Nadja's maternal devotion is matched tenfold by Elias' fierce loyalty. Supported by Setti's humane and honourable Farid, the dynamic between these three strangers alone is enough to prevent Blood Red Sky from taking a complete nosedive after the first thirty minutes or so.