Final Destination Bloodlines
Writers: Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor (screenplay/story); Jon Watts (story)
Directors: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Rya Kihlstedt, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, Tony Todd
The Final Destination films have been around for 25 years now, growing from turn-of-the-millennium high-concept hit to venerated horror institution, and they've done it all by relying on a very specific formula.
It's a hybrid, really, a blend of slasher movie kill counts with disaster cinema bombast, and a whole lot of death trap suspense thrown in for good measure — but it works. It works for a lot of reasons, but one in particular always fascinates me: These are movies which tell you what's going to happen, in a very deliberate way, before anything really hits the fan. The death visions at the core of each Final Destination setup are deliberate telegraphs, portents, and yet in our spoilerphobic culture, we keep watching. Why? Because these films have made it not about the who, or the what, but the craft of how.
But something else has happened with the Final Destination films, something beyond the detailed death sequences and hot young stars, something that feels especially present with the sixth installment — and the first in more than a decade — Final Destination Bloodlines. These are films about encroaching death descending on young people in an age of school shootings, terrorist attacks, pandemics, and even genocide. They're films about a very particular kind of Millennial angst, and with Bloodlines, that angst becomes quite literally generational — and it couldn't have come at a better time.
But, you know, if you just want to show up and eat popcorn while people die in hilarious ways onscreen, it's got you covered there, too.
This time around, our point-of-view character into this world of unrelenting death is Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student who's been plagued by a horrific dream of mass death at a local landmark decades earlier. The thing is, Stef's pretty sure she's dreamed about someone she never met, her maternal grandmother Iris, who left the family before Stefani and her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) were born. Desperate to get rid of the nightmares, Stefani seeks out her grandmother (Gabrielle Rose), who lives in a shack in the middle of nowhere and doesn't dare venture outside. See, Iris had a premonition back in 1968, and avoided the death Stef keeps dreaming about, cheating Death out of her soul. Now, her entire family, including Stefani, is in danger, as Death comes to collect on an entire family tree that was never supposed to exist.
As the title suggests, and the basic plot tees up, Bloodlines does not follow the established Final Destination formula of a young person seeing something horrific in a vision, avoiding that thing, and then trying to keep their friends safe while Death hunts them all down. This time around, that vision happened decades earlier, which means that Stefani has to take it on faith (and the ramblings of a grandmother everyone agrees is crazy and paranoid) that the whole Death thing is really about to happen to her family. And even if she buys it, she has to convince Charlie and her cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), and Julia (Anna Lore) that she's right. The script, by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, plays with this dynamic quite a bit, and it fits right into the Final Destination mold.
And speaking of that mold, it's still alive and kicking. Like I said, these are movies that at a certain point tell you exactly what's about to happen, and then leaves you with two key questions: How will it happen, and will the characters be able to get out of it when it does? Like previous films, Bloodlines establishes a death order for the characters, builds up all sorts of precarious situations, then just lays into them with all-out mayhem. There are at least two sequences in the film, which I won't spoil here, that rank among my favorite Final Destination kills ever. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein are clearly having a ball playing with each of these set-pieces, so much so that occasionally this Final Destination installment veers more into outright horror-comedy than suspense piece. But it's hard to argue with the results.
And beyond the death set-pieces, which is what gets everyone in the door, there's something else quite haunting about this installment. The great Tony Todd returns to the franchise in one of his final film appearances, by which point he knew he was deathly ill and was making his peace with the last bits of work he'd leave behind. Todd's character gets a fitting, even moving, sendoff — but it's not the only emotional high point.
By making this a story of three generations of the same family all trying to outlast a curse one of them unwittingly contracted, Bloodlines expands the franchise's reach in its thematic conversations about the nature of death in the modern world. Previously, these have all been films about young people, fighting to survive in a hostile world, trying to convince adults around them that they're in danger. That's made the movies a very potent metaphor for life as a young adult in America and the wider world right now. It's very easy to feel surrounded by death, fenced in on all sides by it, until you become convinced it's coming for you too.
But the first Final Destination film is 25 years old now, which means that many of the people who saw that one in the theater are now adults with adult or teenaged kids of their own, and they too must grapple with this sense of death on all sides, closing in on their kids, threatening to swallow entire families. By portraying a messy, often disjointed family who all face death in their own ways, Bloodlines widens that thematic reach, and by extension its emotional oomph. It's enough to put the film in the conversation as the best movie this franchise has turned out so far.
Final Destination Bloodlines more than proves that this is a film series with plenty of gas left in the tank, plenty of bloody new fates to explore, and plenty of things left to say about the precarious nature of life right now. It's a remarkably complex film, but on top of all that, it's an adrenaline rush that'll knock you through the back wall of the theater. I had fun, and if you've ever enjoyed one of these movies before, or you're looking for a Final Destination film to make your first, I'm sure you will too.
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