Final Rating: 4/5
When it comes to tense theatrical experiences, there’s nothing better than Final Destination. Over five films and eleven years, the series has produced death scenes often more iconic than the films themselves. Building from a simple premise – a character has a premonition and cheats death, only for death to claim its original victims regardless – Final Destination stands out as a kind of slasher film without a killer. A film where the world itself is out to get the characters. A world where death could come at any moment. Final Destination: Bloodlines, directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the first entry in the series in 14 years, retains the mission statement of the original films while putting a unique spin on the formula.
Like its predecessors, Bloodlines begins with an enormous disaster set piece. In 1968, a woman named Iris Campbell is on a date at the newly-opened Skyview Restaurant Tower on the night that the tower will collapse, killing hundreds. Iris is struck by a vision, enabling her to intervene and evacuate the tower before anyone dies. When Iris saved those people, she simultaneously doomed them all to perish in the order she saw them die. It was hundreds of lives, so it took a while, but just over fifty years later, Death has finally come for Iris and her family in spectacular fashion.
Bloodlines follows Iris’ granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who reconnects with Iris after experiencing her premonition as a recurring nightmare. Clued in to her family’s fate, Stefani sets out to find a way to prevent Death from correcting its decades-old mistake.
Building off previous Final Destination films, Bloodlines quickly lays out the rules:
1. People will die in the order they were “supposed to die”
2. Death can maybe be avoided if the next in line kills someone else, making them take their place
3. A slight modification on account of the extended timescale of Bloodlines: after the next person in line dies, their family will die in order from oldest to youngest
The screenplay, written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, is efficient at establishing the world and the stakes so Bloodlines can get to the good stuff: the kills. Once the Campbells start to die, no place is safe. Every set becomes a deathtrap, brilliantly laid out so the audience never loses sight of all the moving parts.
An early segment at a backyard cookout starts with a glass breaking, one uniquely shaped shard accidentally winding up in a tub of cocktail ice. As the cookout proceeds, the family toasting to and discussing relatives who have passed, the camera never loses sight of that shard. It goes from tub to a glass, to the grass, each step in its journey coming tantalizingly close to ending the event with a bang. All the while, directors Lipovsky and Stein highlight other artefacts in the yard. Could this rake be fatal? How about that trampoline with a lot of wear and tear? Should the person lighting the barbecue be a bit more careful?
The elaborate setpieces of Final Destination are meticulously crafted puzzles of death. Under the right circumstances, anything can be deadly, and the tension in the film comes from trying to predict what combination of innocuous items will bring the end of whoever’s next. The characters in Bloodlines are audience surrogates: clued into what will happen in what order, and desperately trying to piece together the clues to figure out how. In Stefani’s words “it’s math.”
Cinematographer Christian Sebaldt maximizes the tension through his camera placement. Sebaldt draws attention to little things like rope, coins, bottles, glasses. In every shot, it feels like everything is important, and everything is dangerous. And yet Sebaldt remains playful and self-aware. One recurring item, a penny, takes on a life of its own as the camera follows it bouncing around, being picked up, being spent, and then dropped again, spread out over the course of the movie. In the absence of a proper “killer,” the world itself assumes the twisted, gleeful character of the movie slasher.
Underneath the violence and gore, Bloodlines contains a surprisingly touching story about absent parents. After foreseeing the death of hundreds, Iris quickly becomes obsessed with saving the people she can. She withdraws from the world, alienates herself from her family, and ruins her relationship with her children all to stave off fate for as long as possible. Iris’ neglect ultimately leads to her daughter abandoning her family after realizing she’s not prepared to be a mother. Another generation down, Stefani herself begins to recede from the world once she learns about Death’s plan and its rules.
How would someone act if they knew they were the only thing standing between their loved ones and death? Final Destination has always posited that knowledge is as much a curse as fate itself. Bloodlines sees its characters wrestle with the question of which is more important: doing the most with the time that’s left or extending that time as much as possible.
