Final Destination Bloodlines: death just keeps on trucking in this enjoyably grisly horror

Death is patient. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination Bloodlines has been a long time coming, some 14 years after the last in the franchise – and while every entry is inscribed with the sense of an ending, given that they are all chronicles of deaths foretold, Steven Quale’s Final Destination 5 (2011) seemed genuinely to bring the franchise’s narrative arc full circle, looping back to the start of James Wong’s Final Destination (2000). Still, nothing dies harder than a profitable horror series, and just before the release of the fifth, supposedly final instalment, Tony Todd – who starred as the mortician and expositor William Bludworth in the first, second and fifth entries – was already suggesting there might be two more back-to-back sequels if the latest did well enough at the box office. And now there is a new one, belatedly but also inevitably, in which the iconic Todd (whose surname sounds like the German for death), got to play the now dying Bludworth one last time, even as the actor was himself slowly succumbing to stomach cancer. He passed in November 2024, and the film is dedicated to his memory.  

In a sense, this franchise is infinitely extendable. It takes the structure of a slasher – horror’s most by-numbers subgenre – and pares it down even further to its essence by eliminating altogether the masked murderer, now replaced with death itself which, abstract and disembodied, comes to claim its due with a karmic relentlessness as chaotic as it is contrived. Every Final Destination film opens with a character having a vivid premonition of a horrific multiple-fatality disaster (variously on a plane, a highway, a rollercoaster, a car-racing speedway, a bay bridge, or here in a building-top restaurant), and successfully warning others to avoid their grisly fate and to cheat death – only for all the survivors to be subsequently killed in a series of freakish accidents in the order in which they were originally supposed to die. The films thrive on their opening spectacle of mass death, followed by deadly set-pieces where the final destination is always clear, but the way to get there is less predictable. These sequences are Hitchcockian both for their finely tuned tension and their gallows humour.  

What distinguishes Final Destination Bloodlines from its predecessors is the sheer scale of the prologue’s disaster, the unusually large number of people forewarned and rescued from impending doom, and its distance in time from the present day. As its subtitle Bloodlines implies, this is a film concerned with generational legacy, as death gradually catches up not only with those who survived its skyscraper massacre some half a century earlier, but also their children and children’s children, none of whom would ever have been born had fate gone to plan. Student Stefani Lewis (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is haunted by recurring nightmares of the skyscraper slaughter that her estranged, paranoid grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose) evaded some 50 years earlier (played younger by Brec Bassinger), and as death comes for her loved ones, Stefani races to find out if it is possible once more to outwit it, or at least keep it at bay, while also negotiating her place in a family with a history of mental illness and dysfunction.  

From its character comedy to its morbidly macabre cosmic trickery to intra-diegetic needle drops that serve as wittily ironic chorus for all the bloody bodily destruction, Final Destination Bloodlines is always darkly funny. But it is also a memento mori, reminding us of the fate that eventually comes to us all. “Everyone dies,” Iris tells Stefani, in words that sum up both the film’s plotting and life’s natural endpoint, which, though it may be staved off for a spell, can never ultimately be escaped. Even the film’s suggestion that our mortality is an inherited characteristic, passed along the family tree, seems as much literal truth as narrative metaphor. This is horror stripped down to that most fundamental of human fears – the dread of death – and it has us laughing and squirming at its gloriously gory finality. There are callbacks to the franchise’s other films, including two appearances (overkill, when one would have sufficed) of the notorious logging truck from the opening of David R. Ellis’ Final Destination 2 (2003), but really this towering new entry lives – and dies – on its own cruel laughs and barrelling trajectory. It is fast and furious enough to sweep along even the most impatient viewer to its bitter end.

► Final Destination Bloodlines is in UK cinemas now.