‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ movie review: The perverse joy of a thousand tiny dooms

A still from ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’
| Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

There is a perverse pleasure to watching someone get their face turned to mulch by a rogue lawn mower and thinking: this is cinema. Few franchises have made that peculiar feeling a recurring feature like Final Destination, a turn-of-the-millennium horror series that taught an entire generation to fear logs on highways, Lasik eye surgeries, and even the literal wind rustling through leaves. With Final Destination: Bloodlines, co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein have taken the threadbare conceit of death’s invisible designs and re-stitched it into a baroque tapestry of generational trauma, black comedy, and finely-tuned terror. The resulting reboot is an oddly tender eulogy delivered with the unrepentant malice of the average Happy Tree Friends episode (look up “Eyes Cold Lemonade”).

Set partly in the ‘60s and partly in the present day, the film follows two women separated by decades but united by blood and bad omens. The film opens, as all good Final Destination entries do, with a great cataclysm. A swanky new high-rise restaurant collapses. Glass shatters, bodies tumble, and a piano plummets several stories to flatten a bratty child Wile E. Coyote style. It’s absurd, operatic, and viscerally satisfying.

Young Iris narrowly escapes her fate in the Skyview disaster thanks to a freak premonition, and in the present, Iris’s granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana, portraying anxious competence to a tee) begins to unravel her family’s connection to Death’s sinister algorithm. The trick here is that Stefani isn’t just dodging her doomed fate; rather, she’s inherited the narrative literacy of a long-time Final Destination fan. Her instincts are ours: don’t stand near exposed wires, don’t trust sharp objects, and for the love of God, avoid MRI machines. 

Though the recent Scream reboots employ a similar formula quite successfully, in the wrong hands, the meta approach runs the risk of collapsing under its own cleverness. But Bloodlines wears its self-awareness like second skin. Its sense of humour is mordant and slapstick, but it somehow feels earned.

A still from ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.

For all its blood and bone, Bloodlines is also surprisingly invested in character. Yes, the Campbell family is just a lineup of soon-to-be cadavers, but they’re weirdly warm, bickering, loving people. Richard Harmon’s Erik, a goth cynic with piercings and a mushy interior, anchors the ensemble with a charisma all too rare in this franchise. And when Tony Todd’s William Bludworth makes his final, elegiac appearance, the story pauses long enough to offer him a reverential goodbye most horror icons seldom receive.

Not everything lands. The pacing teeters and occasionally stumbles, and the finale strains under the weight of expectations. Then again, Final Destination has always trafficked in the improbable and what’s remarkable here is how Bloodlines leans into that improbability with a genuine affection for the ridiculous.

Bloodlines is a film that understands something essential about the horror genre, and perhaps about life itself. That we are all, in some sense, walking Rube Goldberg machines of our own undoing. That the penny tossed from above may not be random. That Chekhov’s MRI machine will hum menacingly. And that even as we tiptoe around the banana peel of fate, we can still laugh, flinch and root for the turtle.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is currently running in theatres