Review: ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ Reboots Death’s Game With Meta Mayhem

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May 17

Written By Jonathan P. Moustakas

Brec Bassinger in ‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ **Credit: Eric Milner/Warner Bros.**

The sixth Final Destination film gleefully embraces its legacy of over-the-top fatalism and chaotic inventiveness, offering a self-aware, blood-soaked ride that is as hilarious as it is horrifying.

More than two decades after the original film rewrote the rules of supernatural horror, Final Destination: Bloodlines arrives as both a reboot and a reverent homage to its own cinematic lineage. Helmed by directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, this sixth entry doesn’t merely follow the blueprint — it vivisects it, reconstructs it, and sets it ablaze with manic delight, infusing the macabre formula with unexpected depth and wild tonal control.

The franchise has always distinguished itself by one key gimmick: death is not a figure, but a force — a malignant Rube Goldberg machine that dispatches its victims with balletic sadism. But Bloodlines reinvigorates that conceit by playing with legacy, generational trauma, and a touch of speculative absurdity. The result is a movie that’s as eager to poke fun at its own conventions as it is to slice through torsos with airborne sheet metal and hydraulic pressers. What it lacks in restraint, it makes up for in meta-textual hilarity and twisted invention.

‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ **Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures**

The film opens with a doozy of a set piece: a 1950s grand opening of a Space Needle-style glass tower, where young Iris (Brec Bassinger) has a vision of an inferno-induced massacre. Her panicked escape saves dozens — but in the Final Destination cosmos, cheating death merely buys time. The catch? This event was 70 years ago. In the present day, Iris’s granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) begins having vivid nightmares of deaths she never witnessed. Her descent into obsession leads her back to Iris, now a grief-addled recluse played with grave, sardonic wit by Gabrielle Rose. Their story forms the fractured emotional core of the film, elevating what could be simple slaughter into a mythologized meditation on intergenerational consequence.

What Bloodlines adds to the franchise lore is its most subversive element yet: inherited guilt. If Death’s design accounts not just for the missed victims, but their would-be progeny, then the entire concept of "cheating fate" becomes even more tragically futile. This conceit transforms Iris from a lucky survivor into the inadvertent architect of her descendants’ doom. It’s a bleak twist that Bloodlines has fun deconstructing — sometimes literally.

Visually, the film leans into a cartoonish hyper-reality. The deaths are elaborate, ironic, and filled with more setups than a vaudeville routine. There’s an unforgettable death-by-ceiling-fan involving a spilled bottle of essential oil, a jittery pug, and an ill-timed TikTok dance. Another scene weaponizes a kitchen mandoline and a pressure cooker with almost Rube Goldbergian elegance. The CGI blood is outrageous and purposefully tacky — less Saw, more Itchy & Scratchy. Stein and Lipovsky shoot each sequence like a demented ballet, full of zooms, reversals, and sleight-of-hand edits that keep even hardened horror fans on edge.

The performances are intentionally dialed to eleven. Stefani is a grounded presence amid the growing lunacy, while Richard Harmon, as her nihilistic cousin, turns self-destructive recklessness into an art form. Rya Kihlstedt adds pathos as Stefani’s estranged mother, who fled both family and fear years ago. And in a moment of poignant fan service, the late Tony Todd returns as a spectral harbinger, his gravelly voice echoing through the film like a requiem.

For all its silliness, Bloodlines taps into genuine anxieties: of generational burden, of knowing too much too soon, of death as not just a predator but a cosmic joke. It’s a rare horror film that manages to be both completely unhinged and thematically resonant. Like a mirror maze filled with booby traps, the film forces characters — and viewers — to confront mortality with nervous laughter and white-knuckled anticipation.

Lipovsky and Stein understand that Final Destination is at its best when it leans into absurdity. Their pacing is razor-sharp, and their use of misdirection rivals that of a seasoned magician. Every scene toys with the audience, daring them to guess which innocuous detail will become fatal. That tension, that giddy panic, is what the franchise thrives on.

More than anything, Bloodlines succeeds because it knows what it is — and what it isn’t. It doesn’t chase prestige or gravitas. It leans fully into its own mythology, delivering death with style, humor, and the kind of absurd inevitability that feels both terrifying and cathartic.

What elevates Bloodlines beyond pure genre exercise is its gleeful intelligence. It’s a movie made by people who understand the mechanics of suspense and the pleasures of camp — and who have no interest in pretending one diminishes the other. Its sense of humor is a scalpel, slicing through pretension as efficiently as its set pieces slice through bone. Even when characters are reduced to viscera, they remain sharply written, endearing, and sometimes surprisingly moving.

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The narrative’s generational motif isn’t just surface-level symbolism — it becomes a mirror to modern audiences grappling with inherited crises. The sins of the past, embodied by Iris’s trauma, are passed down like haunted heirlooms. Stefani and her peers don’t just inherit fear; they inherit the very conditions that make survival feel like transgression. The film cleverly reflects our world’s obsession with legacy and burden, dressed up in the hyperbole of genre cinema.

And yet, despite all its reflexivity, Bloodlines is deeply watchable. It’s lean and mean in structure, yet expansive in imagination. The film respects its audience enough to be both silly and smart — a balancing act few horror franchises ever pull off this late in the game. Where others grow stale, Final Destination proves it can still surprise.

It won’t win Oscars. It may not even convert horror skeptics. But for fans who’ve stuck with the franchise through five entries of increasingly baroque fatalities, Final Destination: Bloodlines is a bloody, brilliant return to form — a film that dares you to laugh while squirming.