Final Destination Bloodlines

(Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein, USA, 2025)

Death, personified into an Entity with a Will, is quite a Poet. As an inspired metteur en scène, it organises its fatal campaigns around motifs – especially an escaping, rolling coin – and reprises events (the first and last scenes of this film begin with variations on the same sight from the same angle in the same place: a red car passes a train track).

Death is also – as you well know if you have seen any of the previous five instalments of the Final Destination series – a Showman. It gathers up, arranges, and sets vibrating the signs that will interlock into some mortality-serving machine: windblown chimes, overheating grills, shaking surfaces, objects inching over to fall and smash. Death, we hear, makes moves. The moves are slow and steady – and spaced out at Hollywood-manual-appointed intervals of the plot.

In other respects, however, Death’s modus operandi is pretty odd. Its agenda, worse than the worst bureaucratic Public Service, proceeds on a miniscule, case-by-case basis. It works its way methodically through just one family’s ‘bloodline’ generation by generation. Sometimes it might seize the opportunity to make a Knight’s Move and scoop up two victims almost simultaneously (these are the best and most surprising moments of the film) – as well as claiming any helper outside the target-group who dares to “fuck with Death” (one such chap finds his gruesome end through being magnetically sucked into a MRI machine at a hospital – a place where, we are informed, there are “many ways to die”!).

But wouldn’t Death have multiple cases (millions of them!) going at any one moment, all over the globe? Pursuing just One American Family (as it has previously honed in on one community gathering or one friend-gang) seems a bit myopic (and very American) to me – not to say inefficient. Imagine a Final Destination (hereafter FD) movie in which such multiple cases elegantly (and apocalyptically) intertwined in the most delightful and unexpected ways … I really do wish the producers would go there.

Death is also something of a Logician. The opening nightmare-vision (quite an enthralling and impressive high-tower spectacle, and the highpoint of the film) of university student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), beamed into her being from the life-saving premonition (dated 1968) of her grandma, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), joltingly resituates itself at its grim finale to the reality of … a class devoted to vector multiplication (which sounds like a new-old McKenzie Wark book).

As in all previous FD films, Death has a mania for Order, Procedure, organised ‘lines’ of all kinds. It’s “mathematical” in its approach, we hear. (It’s curious that Personified Death in films is often very stately, slow-moving, sauntering, hanging about, going on a holiday and suchlike. Not manic or indiscriminate at all. I guess It has Time on its side, all the Time in the World.) This maniacal tendency of the series has recently met its analytical match in Eugenie Brinkema’s quasi-unreadable, hyper-formalist tome Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), which devotes many words and pages (and diagrams) to the FD series (among other pinned-down horror specimens including the Human Centipede films). Good luck with that.

Every FD entry invites more-or-less the exact same review from the commentariat at large. It runs as follows: Death either masks or embodies (take your pick) the Narrative Machine itself, lining up its paper-thin subjects/characters merely to mow them down, splatter-style, one at a time. There’s an endless semiotic game of signs, seriality and sequencing (see above). Some entries, such as the one under discussion, wheeze while trying to generate some ‘human interest’, such as (usually) familial dysfunction and generational alienation.

Meanwhile, we get a little dime-store philosophising (jammed into one The Birds-like scene here): that’s the way Fate planned it versus we’re all gonna die some day versus love and resilience can surely find a way out of this dilemma.

But the conclusion is always the same: Death always wins. Nobody can cheat it, outplay it, avoid it or reverse it – as our extra-filmic reality tends to banally confirm. When the flying bolts, shards of glass, cracking floors and runaway trains are in short supply, cancer can be relied on to play the ultimate card – that pops up for two older characters, obsessed creatures who have hid themselves away from life, in Bloodlines. Which brings in that other bromide: life is precious, enjoy it while you still can! Woody Allen could have made an interesting/funny FD movie along that line.

Audiences, once again in 2025, love this stuff; they eat it up. The mechanised vision of inevitable death rides the fine line between gory fatalism and disavowable it’s only a movie laughter. As an ongoing series, Final Destination plays the same routines over and over again; it shows no sign of making a move of any sort. But we can always hope.

© Adrian Martin 31 May 2025