“Death is a relentless son-of-a-bitch,” remarks Gabrielle Rose as Iris, a woman whose premonition decades prior jumpstarted one of the most nihilistic horror franchises in the twenty-first century. Not only is death relentless, but he’s still got it with this latest entry coming fourteen years after 2011’s Final Destination 5, bookended by James Wong’s original film about premonitions, planes exploding, and survivors dying in horrifying yet circumstantial accidents. Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025), the sixth entry in the series, is a bloody return to the films that have traumatized a generation of drivers, travelers, rollercoaster riders, and everyone in between.
Bloodlines seems to have fine-tuned and perfected the tried-and-true formula; its wicked embrace of the morbidly cartoonish violence and visual inventiveness gives us one of the best sequels in the franchise.
I love the Final Destination films–famous for involving a major set-piece tied to a character’s premonition, where large-scale death and destruction sets off the first act of the film. Ghosts, demons, vampires, and serial killers don’t scare me in the slightest; death scares me. There’s nothing more terrifying than living in a deterministic world I have no control over, free will is an illusion, and outside forces and choices other people make can lead me to die in the most gruesome, horrifying, bloody manner. That’s partially why this franchise has endured for twenty-five years: by visualizing our fears and intrusive thoughts about dying in a methodical, step-by-step sequence of events that slowly build up, misdirect, and execute in gnarly fashion.
Is watching a metaphysical force set in motion objects and physics in our world, which is used to kill us, convoluted? Of course, it’s easier and boring for Death to kill by heart attack or old age; it’s far more cinematic (and fun) to have a metal fence cut someone into three pieces, or a gymnast flinging herself up in the air to land like a broken lawn chair.
Death is a mischievous, playful, vindictive force in these films, killing victims in the most ironic, hilarious styles, invoking horror and laughter. How can we not laugh when half the characters in this series strut with self-satisfaction, only to have their own choices backfire?
The inciting incident in Bloodlines involves Iris (Brec Bassinger as younger Iris) and her boyfriend attending the grand opening of a high-rise restaurant called Skyview Tower in 1968. Iris has a premonition showing the cracked glass dance floor and the most malicious penny in cinematic history, causing the tower to collapse and explode, killing everyone, including Iris. This premonition forces Iris to warn and save everyone who should’ve died. It’s one of the best premonitions in the series, especially being a period piece involving dozens of extras who die in dynamic ways on a multifaceted set re-created to sufficient effect. These films require sizable budgets to make them look and sound more polished than most horror films. It’s a marvelous visual when a grand piano lands and crushes someone like a grapefruit.
Cut to present day, Iris’s granddaughter, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is having nightmares of her grandmother’s premonition. She goes back home to reconnect with her extended family, who have cut ties with Iris due to her paranoia of death coming after the family. Stefani learns from Iris that because she saved everyone, Death has been tracking down and killing off generations of survivors for the past few decades (including the previous films). Iris was the last to die in her premonition, meaning everyone from Iris’s bloodline is next on Death’s list. This includes Stefani, her brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), Julia (Anna Lore), and Stef’s estranged mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Like previous films, Bloodlines follows these characters’ deaths in the goriest and silliest ways possible via Rube-Goldberg machinations as they try to delay and cheat Death’s plan.
The first four films had their directorial duties switched between Wong and David R. Ellis, with the fifth directed by Steven Quale. Coming to the series for the first time, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein demonstrate a firm, assured handle of what makes this franchise tick. Prior films have tried to some success balancing the grisly horror with the comical absurdity of Death working extra-hard to make his victims suffer horribly. The duo pair, alongside screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor (and a story credit by Jon Watts), establish the perfect equilibrium of diabolically-cruel humor with the palpable tension, followed by misdirection with an undercurrent of knowing something ghastly will happen.
Their creative direction leans into a Looney Tunes sensibility of how imaginatively they can escalate a simple object, leading to the most macabre result possible. One sequence involving a background visual of a soccer ball, a trash bin, and a jogger is a masterful example of black comedy laced in these films. You’re on edge, and before you know it, you’re laughing at body parts exploding.
Even the non-bloody scenes solicit genuine laughter. There are two ways to cheat death: temporarily die and be revived or kill someone to take their remaining time, leading Erik to convince Bobby to take one for the team with the promise he’ll revive Bobby, or glance over the baby ward in a hospital and briefly consider the unwholesome thought. Bloodlines is the funniest film of the year for those who enjoy the darkest humor.
The cast certainly aids in amplifying the film’s humor, particularly Richard Harmon’s Erik, a sarcastic, snarky tattoo artist who spends his time mocking Stefani’s concerns or navigating his path to staying alive. The franchise has plenty of jerks and smug personalities; Harmon strikes the right level of charm and smug. Joyner’s Bobby is an affable, endearing sweetheart, often scared and susceptible to Erik’s influences for self-preservation.
Juana is a great lead, spending her time bewildered by the insanity of the horror she witnesses and convincing her family of Death’s design. She doesn’t match Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Wendy in Final Destination 3 (2006) or Devon Sawa in the first film, but her scared, frantic energy imbues a level of sympathy.
Some narrative elements fall short, especially involving a contrived subplot of Stefani rekindling her relationship with her mother, who abandoned the family. It’s the type of forced melodrama that feels excessive in a film briskly paced with momentum, hurtling people into unexpected places. The ending feels oddly rushed. To stave off Death’s design, the remaining survivors go to Iris’s wilderness fortress, fortified to fend off whatever gust of wind Death sends her way in the climax. It’s no different than third-act entries of the prior films, and it’s been a hallmark for these films to end that can feel anti-climactic.
You can boil them down to being excessive, mean-spirited exercises in turning people into exploding meat puppets, yet, there’s a self-aware twinkle in the film’s ethos that is inviting. There’s a slick allure when the camera follows a simple action happening unbeknownst to the characters and watching it blow up (sometimes literally) in people’s faces. It’s the Alfred Hitchcock bomb analogy: surprise is having a bomb explode without the audience knowing; suspense is the audience knowing a bomb will go off and participating in the build-up.
There is no way to kill Death. Any pretenses of victory are undermined by callous reality. Bloodlines embraces the live-life-to-the-fullest mantra that, with the limited time we have, all one can do is take joy in every breath.
If that sentiment seems too ill-fitting and emotional for this exaggerated franchise, look no further than Tony Todd’s cathartic performance as William Bludworth. Bloodlines contextualizes the origins of Bludworth, a mortician who has imparted wisdom of Death’s design and ways to survive to every poor sap in prior films. His segment acts as an emotional send-off to the character and the actor, as Todd was battling stomach cancer during filming before he passed. Not only do we get to appreciate the final work of an iconic actor of class and screen presence, but Todd also manages the rarest of moments afforded to very few actors to transcend from the screen to the audience.
Bludworth is sick (like Todd) and is resigned that he will die soon; he leaves the film deciding to enjoy his life and reminds Stefani and her family to do the same, something Todd practiced very much by being an exemplary professional with over 200 acting credits. Not many actors can say goodbye to their fans, much less in the context of a movie about death (think Jason Robards’s in Magnolia), yet Todd’s devilish magnetism and deep, gravelly voice leap off the screen and are now ingrained as one of his best performances in an illustrious career. Regardless of how we’ll die, we would only be so lucky if we could join the afterlife with the likes of Tony Todd.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros. Discovery via IMDb