Take Two Review: “Final Destination: Bloodlines”

“Final Destination: Bloodlines” revives the franchise with nihilistic thrills, dark humor, and a fresh twist on Death’s relentless design.

MORBID MINI (TL;DR): Though it may not pack the same punch as the original did with its novel concept and then unusual levels of violence, Bloodlines still provides plenty of gory shocks and tension.

The original Final Destination terrified me. Snippets of its opening air disaster still come back to haunt me every now and again, usually when I am about to board a plane. I was still a teenager in 2000 when it was released, and I had never seen those levels of pure, nihilistic violence.

The film moved me in a way that was equal parts nauseating and thrilling. Older now and mostly dead inside, I was curious to find out whether a new instalment in the series, arriving twenty-five years after the original, could have the same effect. It didn’t. But there is undeniably something unique in the Final Destination formula that creates its very own sense of discomfort.

Final Destination: Bloodlines, like its predecessors, thrives on the intrigue and unease of morbid inevitability.

The film begins with an acrophobe’s worst nightmare, featuring a party atop the several-hundred-meter-high Skyview Tower. On getting a premonition of the horror that awaits, soon-to-be-mother, Iris (Brec Bassinger), is able to prevent disaster and save the lives of all those in attendance. As anyone familiar with the Final Destination series will know, however, Death does not like to be denied his victims.

In previous Final Destination movies, what followed was a process of those spared being picked off one by one, as the spiteful Death (in the non-corporeal form of unfortunate coincidences) reclaimed his victims.

But Bloodlines takes a different approach, instead jumping forward several decades to Iris’s granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who is nightly haunted by visions of the horrific events of Skyview Tower had her grandmother not intervened. In her attempts to discover the meaning of her nightmares, Stefani inadvertently restarts the killings, with Death now coming for Iris’s descendants in the order they were born.

It’s a solid set-up that provides for tense scenes and a variety of bloody endings.

While most of us do not think about it all that much, we live our lives with the constant possibility of death from our environment, whether a gas leak, an electrical fault, or a careless driver. Our bodies are soft and our bones brittle. The film maximises the uncomfortable reality of our organic frailty. The chance of death here is an imminent certainty, and the world itself an enemy.

Bloodlines’ formula maintains a persistent tension: as an audience, we know something is going to go horribly wrong, but we do not know when or how.

The film plays with audience expectations, teasing a potential threat that ends up harmless, before the seemingly harmless ends up deadly. The narrative, therefore, becomes a puzzle, with the viewer trying to work out how minor environmental hazards could combine to make huge catastrophes.

Death likes to play chess, and sometimes the pieces do not fall into place until the last moment.

In its puzzle form, the film is at its most tense and fun. The knife-edge feel is enhanced by high-tier music and exceptional camera work.

But the tension doesn’t always hold up.

Despite its 110-minute runtime and a slow-burn opening fifteen minutes, Bloodlines is a breathless charge. Given that death comes to Iris’s descendants in a specified order, the characters should have time to reflect on their predicament, but this sense of dread is rarely allowed to stew before characters are topped off, and we move on to the next unfortunate relation.

Another element that could make things interesting—the possibility of extending one’s time by taking the life of another human being—is also not satisfyingly explored, despite being teased as a key element in the trailers.

Just like 2025’s similarly themed The Monkey, the breakneck pace of Bloodlines really amps up in the dramatic finale.

By then, however, as with The Monkey, the tension has all but fizzled out in favour of spectacle.

The other break in tension is a more welcome one, brought on by Bloodlines’ surprisingly great use of humour. This humour is, as you might expect, dark and irreverent, but it nevertheless manages to add levity to a core concept that could easily become oppressively bleak.

The lighter tone also lends itself to the family drama in the film, as heartfelt reconciliations take place amongst the absurdity of flying viscera.

The final key to this humour is the extremity of violence. In interviews, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein have said that extra gore was added to Bloodlines after audience screen tests, and the film is never scared of exhibiting character deaths in all their horrible detail.

Instead of making Bloodlines scarier, though, this has the opposite effect—the violence becomes so extreme and the audience so used to that extremity that it approaches farce. While it does make some of the later deaths underwhelming, this excess adds to the absurd comedy that is one of the film’s core strengths.

Although it may not pack the same punch as the original did with its novel concept and then-unusual levels of violence, Bloodlines still provides plenty of shocks and tension. Its story can be somewhat nonsensical (how does covering your cabin in spikes make it safe from Death?), but this only adds to the pantomime of exaggerated violence that is the movie’s main appeal.

For those looking for a tense horror with convoluted kills that betray expectations, as well as a pervasive sense of dread that occasionally breaks for good laughs, Bloodlines has you covered.