Final Destination: Bloodlines Brings New Life To Death’s Design

One of the fun things about Final Destination: Bloodlines is that its heroine essentially knows she’s in a Final Destination movie. The protagonists in these films have historically cottoned on to the fact that Death is after them and others who sidestepped a deadly tragedy, and then attempted to break the cycle, but Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is so in tune with fate’s design that she can walk down a suburban street and recognize that, say, a soccer ball and a leaf blower are a potentially lethal combination, and how that might come to pass. This adds a bit of a meta level to the proceedings, and thus it’s not surprising to note Guy Busick, who worked on the last two Screams, as one of the screenwriters.

One of the nice things about Final Destination: Bloodlines is that it’s likely to be a popular success and thus do a lot for the careers of directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky. It’s their first feature since the terrific, underappreciated Freaks came out in 2019, and Bloodlines proves them to be just the right people to reinvigorate a franchise that has been dormant for 14 years. It doesn’t reinvent the property, exactly, but it does bring vigor, rooting interest, and some surprise to what may be the most necessarily formula-bound of modern horror-film series.

It also contains what is arguably the best of one of Final Destination’s defining ingredients: the opening disaster set piece. It’s not just a sustained sequence, it’s a mini-movie of its own, set in the 1960s and following fresh-faced young couple Iris (Brec Bassinger) and Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) on an ill-fated date at the Skyview Restaurant, an eatery-topped tower clearly modeled on Seattle’s Space Needle. As they make their way up in the exterior elevator to the dining level with its glass dance floor and an observation deck with a railing that seems just a little too low, Stein and Lipovsky both successfully play on audience vertigo and demonstrate an adeptness at the little teases of how the situation will go fatally awry. When it does, the result is a viscerally scary and spectacular highlight of the entire Final Destination canon, in which Bassinger, previously seen in 47 Meters Down and The Man in the White Van, cements her status as a newly minted scream queen.

And then… it’s not a spoiler to reveal that the whole thing has been a dream of Stefani, our main heroine and a college student whose studies have been adversely affected by this recurring nightmare. So she returns home to a pair of households fully stocked with good-looking young people — her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), and Julia (Anna Lore) — of the type Death has just loved to prey on throughout these films. Yet the fact that they and Bloodlines’ other potential victims are part of an extended family, rather than a group of randos who get out of the wrong place at the right time, means there’s greater involvement with their plight than in the last few sequels.

The same goes for another familiar trope employed in Bloodlines: the elderly woman/supernatural expert whom the protagonists must visit to learn the secrets of survival. In this case, that’s the now-older Iris (Gabrielle Rose), Stefani’s grandmother who’s been estranged from the rest of the family and has secluded and fortified herself against Death in ways that make Laurie Strode in the later Halloweens look carefree. Her survival of the Skyview disaster, it turns out, has imperiled her current descendants; the specific reasons it has taken so long for that danger to pay off won’t be detailed here, but let’s just say that Death has had a lot on its hands in the intervening years.

That’s another of the little variations on the theme that makes Final Destination: Bloodlines seem somewhat fresh even as the overall storyline (scripted by Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, with Spider-Man mogul Jon Watts originating the story) hits the familiar beats. Stefani and her kin try to figure out ways to outmaneuver their violent destinies, but Death always has an extra little surprise to spring on them and continues to behave like a prop comic in sending its victims to their maker. The demises are varied, play out as nasty and gruesomely amusing at the same time, and are brought off with a combination of practical makeup effects and CG gore. As always, the former are more effective; the movie’s showiest digital demises don’t match the relatable squirm power of the bits involving Erik’s piercings, as previewed in Bloodlines’ first trailer.

In the buildup to the splatter gags, Stein and Lipovsky create several moments of who’s-going-to-get-it-and-how? suspense, most notably in a lengthy visit to a hospital. Beyond effectively turning a locale that’s supposed to heal into a place where exactly the opposite occurs, this also occasions the appearance of Destination regular Tony Todd as the mysterious mortician Mr. Bludworth. It will also be his last, as this was Todd’s final film gig before he passed away last year, and his loss lends an extra elegiac level to his dialogue in what turns out to be Bloodlines’ most moving scene. The preview audience I saw the movie with rewarded the prologue and a few of the most over-the-top kills with applause, but it was loudest when Todd made his non-fatal, much more peaceful exit from the scene. Given his absence, among other reasons, Bloodlines may be a tough act to follow if there are further Destinations.

Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters May 16.