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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Review – A Gory, Generational Thrill Ride
Does Final Destination: Bloodlines live up to the legacy of its predecessors? We breakdown its suspense, character arcs, and signature death sequences.
May 16, 2025
A Gory, Generational Thrill Ride That Rewires the Franchise’s DNA. The sixth Final Destination is fast, funny, and fiendishly creative—an IMAX-sized reminder that Death is the ultimate franchise architect.
Clocking in at a brisk hour and fifty minutes and proudly wearing its hard-earned R rating, Final Destination: Bloodlines arrives in theaters with the swagger of directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, who work from a screenplay by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor. Shot for IMAX, the film revels in dizzying vertical compositions that make its opening tower-collapse disaster feel even more stomach-dropping. When the movie eventually migrates to premium video-on-demand, those wide frames will still sing, but the communal gasp of an opening-night crowd is absolutely the way to experience this one if you can.
If you are hunting for cast lists, plot summaries, or a place to test whether you’d outwit Death’s design, the dedicated hub on What’s After the Movie has you covered. That page houses everything from interactive quizzes and aggregated critic scores to deep-cut trivia and convenient links to the likes of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb. The broader What’s After the Movie blog is also updating daily with scene-breakdowns, horror retrospectives, and Easter-egg hunts, so consider it your post-screening refuge when the credits roll.
The year is 1960 and the newly christened Skyview Tower—a glass-and-steel beacon that splits the skyline like Seattle’s Space Needle—promises fine dining and a diamond ring for young sweethearts Iris and Paul. Unfortunately, one tossed penny, a suspiciously jerky elevator, and an overworked kitchen staff are all it takes to set up a Rube Goldberg nightmare that ends in a catastrophic collapse. Iris experiences a vivid premonition of the calamity and, in that moment, saves a handful of patrons before the tower actually falls.
Decades later, Iris’s granddaughter Stefani Lewis (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) cannot shake recurring nightmares that replay the disaster in full, sensory detail. Her academic life spirals, her social circles fracture, and her estranged family suddenly feels less like a safety net and more like a collection of targets. As relatives begin to die in the precise order they should have perished back in 1960, Stefani realizes Death’s ledger still has blank spaces—and every branch of the family tree is penciled in.
What distinguishes Bloodlines from its predecessors is the decision to shift the moral calculus from a gaggle of friends to a multi-generational family. Previous chapters often treated their ensembles like disposable chess pieces, but here the bonds run deeper and every fatality reverberates along bloodlines and shared memories. The emotional stakes climb accordingly; when a cousin bleeds out in a tattoo parlor mishap, the grief isn’t politely shelved during the next scene.
Equally new is the film’s willingness to lean hard into comedic timing. From the very first needle-drop of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” Lipovsky and Stein telegraph their love of Evil Dead-style slapstick, building overt visual jokes out of beer bottles, dangling nose rings, sputtering halogen lamps, and a devilishly magnetic MRI coil. It is the sort of gleeful sadism that elicits shocked laughter rather than quiet dread.
And then there is Tony Todd. Appearing for one final, soul-deep monologue as mortician William Bludworth, the late horror icon transforms a routine lore dump into a bittersweet curtain call that connects the fictional math of “cheating Death” with mortality’s real-world inevitability. The moment is brief, but it lingers long after the headless bodies stop twitching.
Every Final Destination rises or falls on the ingenuity of its kill sequences, and Bloodlines boasts a handful that belong in the franchise’s highlight reel. The opener remains the crown jewel: a penny tumbling through floor-to-ceiling glass, a swing band blissfully unaware on a suspended dance floor, and a fiery cascade of structural failures that makes the audience crane their necks in genuine, dizzy awe.
Later, a tattoo-parlor gag proves why metal implements, wet floors, and a sudden blackout are a recipe for arterial spray. The film’s cleverest misdirection, however, belongs to an MRI suite that weaponizes every metallic object in the building, transforming a routine diagnostic machine into a meat grinder. At ground level, a trampoline-and-garden-rake combo lands squarely in Looney Tunes territory, while a climactic railroad set piece manages to turn a simple copper penny into the perfect conductor for human carnage. The practical effects are satisfyingly chunky, the digital blood is sparingly deployed, and Lipovsky’s camera always holds the punchline an extra heartbeat longer than polite viewers might prefer.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana shoulders most of the narrative weight with credible panic and a stubborn streak that keeps Stefani sympathetic even when the script saddles her with a notebook of inherited lore. Richard Harmon, sporting multiple piercings and a rogue’s grin, injects a jolt of anarchic charm as cousin Erik, effectively daring Death to use every piece of metal on his body as ammunition. Veteran character actor Gabrielle Rose brings welcome gravitas to Iris, the guilt-ridden matriarch who has spent decades stockpiling booby-trapped survival cabins. And, of course, Tony Todd’s rattling bass voice remains one of horror cinema’s most reliable chills; watching it fail only because the man himself has passed lends the film a melancholy undercurrent.
The original Final Destination weaponized everyday inconveniences like airplane turbulence and tanning beds; Part 2 gave motorists highway anxiety for life; Part 5 perfected the spine-tingling “almost stepped on a screw” tease. Bloodlines distinguishes itself by folding family trauma into the formula and by embracing a wry, Raimi-esque sense of play. The kills may not always match the grisly elegance of the franchise’s bridge collapse or roller-coaster derailment, but their cartoon-logic exuberance is hard to resist.
Where the new film occasionally stumbles is in pacing—dense genealogical exposition sometimes bogs down the momentum—and a handful of CGI splashes lack the tactile squish that practical gore delivers. Yet even when the splatter looks glossy, the timing of each gag lands, and the laughter-through-fingers spirit that defines Final Destination never fades.
Curious how critics and audiences are reacting? Early chatter on Metacritic has aggregated into a cautiously optimistic score, while the Rotten Tomatoes audience meter climbs with each wide-eyed early screening. Over on IMDb and Letterboxd, user reviews skew positive, praising the opening tower set piece and Tony Todd’s elegiac cameo. Box-office watchers can track financial momentum on Box Office Mojo, and completists will find production trivia indexed on Wikipedia and TMDB. As for future streaming availability, JustWatch is already monitoring platform licenses, while ticketing details remain live on Fandango.
Final Destination: Bloodlines resurrects the long-dormant series with renewed vigor, high-wire visual comedy, and an unexpectedly poignant farewell to its resident Grim Reaper surrogate. By reframing Death’s vendetta around lineage rather than luck, the movie pumps fresh blood into the formula without abandoning the domino-topple suspense that fans crave. A slightly overstuffed midsection and the occasional CGI smear keep it shy of perfection, but when those intricate kill machines rev into motion, the grin on your face will be as involuntary as the shrieks echoing through the auditorium.
See it on the biggest screen you can if the thought of a packed crowd gasping in unison delights you; stream it later if narrative tightness matters more than plasma. Either way, when the emergency lights fade and you finally unclench your seat-arm, drop by What’s After the Movie to tackle our quiz and compare notes with fellow doom-dodgers. After all, Death may keep score, but horror fans keep receipts.
Rating: 4 out of 5 skulls ☠️☠️☠️☠️
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