The descendants of a woman who cheated death in the 1960s are stalked by the pale rider decades later in Final Destination: Bloodlines, which opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This sixth entry in the franchise and first since 2011’s Final Destination 5 benefits from an engaging narrative that shakes up the usual story and some creative murder set pieces, but murky visuals and over-reliance on substandard CGI effects keep it from truly soaring.
Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in the 1960s at the opening of the Skyview Restaurant Tower, a Space Needle-like structure not unlike the one that served as a background for Drop. Iris (Brec Bassinger) is proposed to by boyfriend Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones), but their engagement turns into disaster during an elaborate Rube Goldberg setup that begins with a single penny and ends up with the entire building falling to pieces and bodies gruesomely falling to the ground.
In previous Final Destination movies, this initial disaster would be revealed to be a premonition, but Bloodlines shakes things up a bit: it’s actually a nightmare, six decades later, keeping college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) awake every night. But it’s a pretty specific nightmare, and Stefani infers that the protagonist at its center must be the grandmother she’s never met.
Stefani tracks down an elderly Iris (Gabrielle Rose) at a remote cabin in the woods, which in contrast to the usual horror movie tropes, is a safe haven from the cold grasp of death where she has survived for decades. There, Iris reveals that Stefani’s dream was originally her premonition—and after preventing the Skyview disaster, she has been hiding from death as everyone else who was supposed to perish that day has been picked off one by one.
But death isn’t only content to come for Iris: because she was supposed to die in the 60s, her children and grandchildren should have never existed. And after Iris goes, Stefani must convince the rest of her family that death is coming for them next, starting with uncle Howard (Alex Zahara), his kids Julia (Anna Lore), Erik (Richard Harmon), and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), Stefani’s estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), and her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones).
Like the last couple entries in the series, The Final Destination and Final Destination 5, Final Destination: Bloodlines leans towards comedy in the elaborate death traps it sets for its characters, and even resembles Osgood Perkins’ off-kilter The Monkey at times. The set pieces here are wildly creative, and a trio of scenes at a backyard BBQ, in a tattoo parlor, and within an MRI lab at a hospital are particularly well-staged by directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (2018’s Freaks), and even top the opening bloodbath.
The story, credited to screenwriters Guy Busick (Abigail) and Lori Evans Taylor along with producer Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home), adds a fresh family dynamic that pays off nicely. The central theme of characters confronting their own inevitable demise also feels a little deeper in Bloodlines than in previous Final Destinations. Iris manages to keep herself alive for decades, but at what cost? As Stefani begins to look for death around every corner, she stops living in the moment; at what point does the avoidance of death mean that we stop living our lives?
The filmmakers are clearly fans of the earlier films, and numerous visual cues dig into franchise nostalgia; particularly the freeway pileup caused by a lumber truck from the second movie, which remains the series’ most memorable scene and is referenced here multiple times. In one of his final on-screen roles, Tony Todd reprises his role as the series’ only recurring character, and gets a nice sendoff that underscores the franchise’s themes.
For the sixth entry in a long-running franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines might have the best story of any of these films. Unfortunately, there’s one major problem: the entire film is visually unappealing, with murky cinematography by Christian Sebaldt (Reagan), flat lighting, dull composition, and unusually poor visual effects that undercut the film’s big elaborate set pieces. The filmmakers do such a good job of generating tension only for their characters to turn into an explosion of gore that feels like a Mortal Kombat fatality.
The bland look of the film is something of a trend in 2020s cinema, with drab presentations becoming unfortunately common in films that rely more and more heavily on post-production compositing; the artificial nature of this one is apparent from the very first sequence, which takes place during an unnerving perpetual sunset. The visuals stand out more here, perhaps, because Final Destination: Bloodlines comes 15 years after the last entry, which didn’t have these kinds of visual issues.
Despite the unappealing look of the film, Final Destination: Bloodlines succeeds where it counts for most horror fans with inventive kills, solid suspense, and a story that adds some unexpected weight to the usual franchise formula. It’s a welcome return that honors the franchise’s roots while nudging the concept in a fresh direction, and serves as a reminder of why Final Destination remains the gold standard of Rube Goldberg horror.
