“What it’s about is making things surprising, but inevitable,” the late Stephen Sondheim told D.T. Max in a 2022 profile for The New Yorker. “That’s the great principle of all art that takes place in time.” For a quarter-century, the Final Destination series has operationalized and weaponized the spirit of this dictum to terrify audiences around the inevitability of death. Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein’s Bloodlines, its sixth entry and first in 14 years, finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.
Paradoxically, the film unlocks new vitality within the franchise by largely adhering to a proven formula. Any given Final Destination film plays out like an inverted Mission: Impossible, where a loose plot connects centerpiece sequences of characters narrowly avoiding death. While the peril is similar, a small detail flips the result. Here, the Grim Reaper always wins.
There’s an odd comfort in the ruthless rationality of death as depicted throughout Bloodlines, which kicks off as all Final Destination movies do: with a premonition of a mass fatality event that proves to be a prelude for what’s to come. And the order in which the characters die within the dream also applies to how they will meet their grisly end in the real world.
The twist here is that, unlike previous protagonists in the series, the soothsaying Stef (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) cannot locate herself in the mid-20th-century sequence of mayhem that consumes her nightmares. Despite the urging of her family not to do so, she seeks out Iris (Gabrielle), the final girl of her fantasy—who happens to be her estranged grandmother. A visit to Iris’s risk-avoidant rural enclave sets the stage for a showdown between death and Iris’s descendants, none of whom should exist after she cheated her intended fate.
As written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, this multigenerational take on the franchise’s lore endows Bloodlines with some poignant emotional heft. In their macabre manner, the kill sequences highlight the miracle of life by revealing the vast web of tiny coincidences propping up humanity’s fragile existence. Dying isn’t a shocking outcome, but living is.
While Final Destination films usually revolve around teens learning a lesson about the consequences of leading impetuous lives, the victims here get a more mature education. By obsessively protecting her family at any cost, Stef’s mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), demonstrates how the central paranoia powering the franchise bears little distinction from everyday parenting. The sense of imminent opportunity for doom supplies a constant drumbeat of anxiety for those trained to see it, death itself ironically comes with merciful swiftness.
In a slight nod to the changed world since the previous entry in 2011, concerns about safety and sanity run in reverse. Though Iris’s fear formed in an analog age, she’s the very model of conspiracy theory culture that’s proven pervasive in our disorienting digital era. Though her obsessive caution is justified here, it still rots the family from the head down.
But the character of Iris is where the topicality ends. Lipovsky and Stein stick to the evergreen stylistic playbook of the series as they assemble their body count. (Their devotion even extends unnecessarily to shooting certain inanimate objects as if they’ll be given a slapdash conversion to 3D in post-production.) This entry in the series has all the hallmarks that devotees know and love: Dutch angles to signify death’s impending strike ahead of constant red herrings and near-misses to build up tension before delivering a CGI splatter-fest of mutilated flesh.
Most importantly, however, they get one last appearance from the late Tony Todd. His character, funeral director William Bludworth, marked the series’s most stalwart presence and the closest thing to its moral center. In Bloodlines, his cameo appearance comes complete with a monologue on the value of enjoying every second of life because it could end at any second. Jarringly saccharine though it may be, it’s only fitting that Todd gets to sum up the franchise whose identity he helped define as it attempts to relaunch for a new generation of horror fans. Death may be the loudest voice in the room, but it doesn’t always get the final word.
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