Final Destination: Bloodlines

Unless you are willfully avoiding the news, you’ve likely concluded that we are living in troubling times. With the greed-fuelled rise of unregulated, increasingly “conscious” AI, the deliberate and unfounded creation of economic uncertainty by our American “friends,” and the spread of once-contained illnesses like the measles, it’s easy to feel as if we are under siege. So, depending on how you cope, you may feel like burying your head in the sand, losing yourself in YouTube cooking videos, or starting a new exercise regime at the gym. Still others may choose to lose themselves in a film or two. But while some opt for something uplifting, inspirational, or playful, if you’re the type who is best distracted/entertained by a good scare, we’ve got a suggestion.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) is the newest installment of the hit horror franchise that got its start with the original, Final Destination (2000). In this, the fifth film, Grandmother Iris (played in the present by Gabrielle Rose and in early adulthood by Brec Bassinger) is sought out by Granddaughter Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), after years of profound family estrangement. The impetus for Stefani comes after a pattern of nightmares that threaten to derail her sanity and that of her sleep-deprived college roommate. What are they about? Her Grandmother of course, whom she has yet to meet due to a fracture that also impacts her mother Darlene Campbell (Rya Kihlstedt).

But when Stefani reaches out to her reclusive and isolated Grandmother, she’s alarmed to discover that the nightmares that have been plaguing her are not mere fantasy, but visions of a near miss that her Grandmother experienced decades earlier. While the entire film is brimming with intense, edge-of-your-seat moments designed to compel viewers to verbally urge the unsuspecting characters not to do, go, move, run, drink, jump, drive, push,  or engage in any number of activities lest it lead to their untimely and gruesome ends, the onslaught of death that is pursuing the family in the present (hence the term bloodlines in the title), began decades earlier when a pregnant Iris escaped death by not going into the newly opened high-rise Skyview Tower in 1968.

Canadians are familiar with such buildings since we have a few of our own like the Skylon Tower (Niagara Falls, Ontario), the Calgary Tower (Calgary, Alberta), and of course, the CN Tower (Toronto, Ontario), the last two of which have glass floors like the fictional Skyview Tower. The opening sequence in the movie is pulse-pounding, unfolding stories above the ground in the newly opened Skyview Tower in which well-dressed guests have gathered to eat, celebrate, and dance (on a cracking glass floor), including Iris and her boyfriend Paul Campbell (Max Llyod-Jones). But while others celebrate mindlessly, a weary Iris is attuned to eerie clues that portend the grisly deaths of the partiers.

Cleverly, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein do not allow viewers the certainty of knowing if the opening sequences of a young Iris’s horrible premonitions were her actual experiences until later in the movie when Stefani reaches out to her estranged Grandmother for insight into her reoccurring nightmare. But when Iris gives Stefani the “gift” of a manuscript filled with her wildly scribbled theories, what she learns is so disconcerting that she (and the rest of her skeptical family) decide that Grandma Iris is not to be believed.

The movie is a strange blend of laugh-out-loud, outrageous comedy and cover-your-eyes horror, with the writers Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor, and Jon Watts displaying ever more creative and ghastly ways to kill people. Their disturbing premise is this: what if death is an entity that comes for all of us at a specific time, and if we cheat it, it does not just want payback through the death of the individual who initially escaped it, but through the demise of their progeny too, in the order of their births. Iris, who escaped death on opening day of the Skyview Tower came to believe this with absolute certainty and it was that belief that drove her to live in an isolated, fortified cabin in the woods to protect herself from death, and more importantly, to protect her family as well.

So, when Iris dies while handing over her manuscript to Stefani, it is up to Stefani to take over as family protector. But first, she must convince her disbelieving father Marty Reyes (Tonpo Lee), her playful brother Charlie Reyes (Teo Briones), and her skeptical cousins Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), Julia (Anna Lore), and Erik (Richard Harmon) that they are in danger. Harmon turns in a particularly hilarious performance as the irreverent tattooed and pierced eldest cousin who is not buying any of Stefani’s theories of Grandma Iris’s fantastical manuscript.

The film keeps you guessing about which characters will die, in what order, and through what means. It also unsettles by introducing ideas about who should technically be safe from a vengeful death, only to rip the bloodied rug out from under your feet. What do we mean? Well, when Erik is informed by his mother Brenda (April Telek) at a comically tense family gathering that his dad Howard (Alex Zahara) – who has recently been killed in a lawnmower accident – was not his biological father, he believes that he is safe from death’s grip since he is technically (like mom Brenda) not biologically related to Grandma Iris. However, we soon discover that this is not the case.

When Erik dives into big brother mode, devoting himself to protecting little brother Bobby, he dreams up a way to save him after learning that death will not take someone who has died and been revived. Erik’s not so simple plan then is to kill Bobby by encouraging him to eat a chocolate-covered peanut butter cup (he’s deathly allergic to peanuts) and then resuscitate him and what better place to do so than in a hospital? So, after the family travels to a hospital seeking information from William John Bludworth (Tony Todd) – the black man who Iris saved as a child way back in 1968 – Erik and Bobby split off from the rest of the family to put their plan into action.

But when the pair find themselves in a room with a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine that is uncannily activated to a high frequency – you know, the machines that you are not supposed to be around while wearing any metal – with metal nose, tongue, ear, nipple, and penis piercings, poor disbelieving Erik is sucked pelvis first into the machine while a suffocating Bobby – yes, he’s eaten the peanut-laced chocolate – is desperately trying to take the EpiPen (epinephrine injection) from his dead brother’s hand. Yeah, we warned you that the characters die in gruesome ways!

By this point in the film, you’re certainly wondering who, if anyone, will survive and if Grandma Iris has left them enough information to keep her descendants – those who, according to her theory, were never supposed to be born – alive. Final Destination: Bloodlines is a provocative, gory, entertaining, and oddly funny horror movie that centres a loving family comprised of straight-laced and eccentric characters, many of whom stubbornly refuse to heed Grandma Iris’s prophetic warnings. But they ignore her  at their peril, of course. If you’re the type of person who is best distracted from real-life horror by fantastical horror, this movie might be right on time!