Ivan Radford | On 21, Jul 2025

Director: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, Tony Todd
Certificate: 15

After five films, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Final Destination franchise had reached a dead-end. Even after a witty fifth outing that found a new twist on the initially inspired premise, it seemed unlikely that there could be new thrills and surprises to be found in another tale of Death stalking victims who have escaped its clutches. Enter Final Destination: Bloodlines, a sharp, sinewy horror that does what all the best legacyquels do: delves into its own history while cutting enough ties with it to point us in a whole new direction.

The film begins with one of the best set pieces ever to grace a Final Destination film: a night out gone horrifically awry at the launch of Sky View, a new high-rise restaurant outside of New York. Iris (the heart-wrenching Brec Bassinger) has a premonition of the restaurant’s fiery collapse, and it’s a masterclass in precision-tooled suspense, from cracking glass to crumbling staircases – somewhere between a nightmarish date and a disaster movie in its own right.

The twist? We don’t see the tower collapse through Iris’ eyes, but through those of Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student who doesn’t understand why she keeps seeing the same vision over and over. This is the ingenious idea at the heart of the screenplay by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor (from a story by Jon Watts, Busick and Evans Taylor): the Sky View disaster took place in 1968, and Iris is Stefani’s grandmother. The premonitions have been inherited by Stefani – along with Death’s vengeful determination to wipe out the whole of the family’s bloodline.

Gabrielle Rose is excellent as the grown-up Iris, who now lives in a reclusive cottage and has written down all her theories about Death into a book – because neither of these things would ever make her look unhinged or untrustworthy. The older Iris is at once bitter, lonely, vulnerable and at peace – and she’s a great counterpart to Kaitlyn Santa Juana, who is charismatic, earnest and resilient as a student learning to reconnect with estranged relatives and to simply survive.

The rest of the cast are having fun as walking potential victims, from Teo Briones as Stefani’s innocent younger brother, Charlie, her cynical cousin, Erik (Richard Harmon), her clueless and gullible cousin, Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), her former friend, Julia (Anna Lore), and her worried and haunted mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). There’s a gentle balance between generational trauma and genuine terror, which is embodied by a lovely final turn from Tony Todd as mortician William Bludworth, who brings a poignant warmth to his intimidating smile.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein juggle that tonal shift with a wry grin, able to tip us from knowing humour to full-on dread with the slightest movement of a prop. From BBQs and trampolines to cleaning up after work or even – in one nail-biting hospital sequence – attempting to cheat Death preemptively, Bloodlines matches the franchise’s best at turning everyday scenarios into Rube Goldberg-esque death traps. It all moves along at a lean pace with no time for indulgence. Crucially, the film also never strays from plausibility, right down to the logic that changes the way you see the connections between each film that has gone before – and, with the period prologue setting a precedent for going back in time, opens up Death’s playing field into a fresh creative ballgame. If you’re a Final Destination fan, this film is for you. If you’ve never seen one before, strap yourself in and prepare for a playful, tense ride.

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