'Bloodride: The Ultimate Sacrifice' explores obsessive pet parenting and what greed can do to a family
Spoiler alert for 'Bloodride' Season 1 Episode 3 'The Ultimate Sacrifice'
Often a film or a series attempts at tackling several dysfunctional units of society and ends up delivering a mess so convoluted that it pretty much loses its entire purpose. Luckily, that is not the case with Netflix's bloody trip to Norway as its latest anthology brainchild 'Bloodride' uses less than 30 minutes to spin a satire on topics ranging from obsessive pet-owners to the imminent downfall caused by greed and karma resurfacing to bite one in the ass. All of this, with a dash of superstition and folklore, is what makes the series' third episode, titled 'The Ultimate Sacrifice' stand apart.
The story opens with a reporter about to interview an entrepreneur who became rich overnight after winning the lottery. The very next scene transports us to a family of three humans and their beloved dog Bolt moving to the countryside after a long stint in urbanization. The mother - Molly - is visibly upset about the move, while the father - Leon and the couple's teenage daughter Katja try to thoroughly enjoy the commute despite the matriarch's firm displeasure. There's an eerie sense of foreboding even amid the green expanse at their disposal with their dumpster of a house, aching to be renovated, resembling the gloom Molly's mind is wrapped in. It's ironic because Molly maxing out the family's investment is the reason behind their dreary move, but somehow she can't digest the fact that it might take Leon about five to six years to afford to move back into the city.
However, it's not only the accommodation inconvenience that hits Molly as a red flag, but it's also their new neighbors - a bunch of seniors who are somehow fixated on the property and aren't shy of being intrusive at all. The neighbors, an old couple, are signified by two features: a constantly plastered smile on their faces and some pretty intense petting they shower their pets with, whom they also happen to carry around wherever they go. Soon introductory greetings turn into the neighbors pretty much offering to renovate the house and inviting the entire neighborhood over to do the job. As hordes of people begin coming in, Molly can't help but notice how deeply invested and literally attached to their pets all of them are. It's not your regular invested owner who would throw an elaborate themed birthday party for their pets or book separate first-class seats for their furry family members. These people have a problem to the level where they can't spare a second without petting their pets and to answer Molly's curiosity, they claim "You never know when you'll need them."
This particular 'need' soon becomes clear when Molly goes on a run along the woods and finds her aged neighbor along with another woman, gearing up to sacrifice their pets. Turns out, the land belonged to the Vikings who deemed the sacrificial stone as a forebearer of great luck. So the entire neighborhood's people raise their pets with utmost love, affection and care to deepen the bond as that somehow intensifies the extent of the luck sacrificing them would bring. Molly learns this the hard way, as first, she resorts to killing house rats infesting their dilapidated house's basement and wins a bare minimum amount of money in a lottery. This only spurs her desperation to win a larger sum because the urban soul can't fathom the idea of spending a single month in this dull landscape. So after much consideration, Molly does the inevitable and ends up sacrificing the family dog, Bolt, on the Viking sacrificial stone.
At the same time tragic and shocking, right when one might think that okay, soon as the realization hits Molly, she's going to snap out of it and make amends, it is the heartbreaking failure to win the day's lottery that actually sits with Molly. Turns out, her bond with Bolt was never deep enough to begin with, so even as she confesses to her husband she might have done something wrong, she actually takes him to the sacrificial stone and attacks him - because Leon is someone she loves and cares for deeply. There is no questioning their bond, so that's definitely going to bring some major luck and turn their lives around, right? Well, not quite. After wounding Leon pretty bad, before she can hit him with a fatal blow, Katja arrives and ends up killing Molly on the sacrificial stone and as the narrative returns to the current timeline, we see Katja is the entrepreneur being interviewed.
Molly's greed rivaled by the rest of her neighbors' paints a clear picture of desperation aided by superstition. Every time they need a little luck, they kill a little because they have provided their pets with the utmost and beyond all for that moment of glory, right? Making the ultimate sacrifice is no big deal for them.
'Bloodride' premieres with all six episodes on Friday, March 13, only on Netflix.