Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) Review

I love Final Destination. In fact, for me the films make up the best horror franchise ever made. This might be a controversial opinion, but with five films in the series and no bad ones among them, I would challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

This passion was why I was trepidatious to attend the press screening of the 6th instalment, titled Final Destination: Bloodlines, especially as it has emerged 14 years after the last film. With so many horror reboots, reimaginings and regurgitations failing to mimic, capture or sometimes even understand what made the originals so amazing, I quite rightly feared the same for my beloved horror series.

Thankfully though, Bloodlines is a brilliant addition to the Final Destination collection, which has shockingly been running since the 2000 original Final Destination set the template for terror 25 years ago. If you have never seen one of these movies the set up is as stunningly simple as it is endlessly original, and centres around a small group of individuals who avoid a horrific and catastrophic disaster through a premonition, only to have Death come for them one by one to readdress the cosmic balance that has been undone.

What the talented Jeffrey Reddick did in his original script was make a slasher movie where the monster was Death itself, and the means of execution an endless innovative cycle of freak accidents that played out like ridiculous Rube Goldberg chain reactions. This results in the characters and audience often have no idea what mucked up way anyone is going to die.

Having a formless supernatural force as the merciless monster that the characters must face not only amplifies the fear, but adds a fascinating element of futility. Are they all doomed from the start? Or can they change their fate? Add to this the terrific Tony Todd as a reoccurring character and some of the best set pieces in horror, and you can see why Final Destination has been so successful and long-lived.

From airplane explosions to motorway pile-ups, to amusement park perils and speedways smashes, the movies kept entertaining us with more and more crazy creative and downright disgusting deaths… all the way up to Final Destination 5 in 2011, which perfectly wrapped things up.

Bloodlines brings us back – further back in fact – than many may expect, starting in 1968, where Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) and her boyfriend are attending the opening of the Skyview Restaurant Tower.

Freaked out from the start, Iris sees several signs of impending doom along her trip up the elevator, across the glass dance floor and out to the observation deck. But she doesn’t act on any of these feelings and we are forced to witness her and hundreds of other people dying in an immense and insane accident.

Flashing forwards to modern day we realise that this is not Iris’s prophecy, but actually her granddaughter Stefani Reyes’s, a college student unable to sleep due to the reoccurring nightmares of death and destruction she is having.

Heading home to question her relatives about her strange and violent visions, Stefani finds that everyone from her father to her uncle and cousins refuses to speak about Iris and the madness she put them all through. Driven by an obsession that Death was stalking her and her loved ones, the family broke all ties with Iris many years ago and have not heard from her since.

Desperate for answers, the young woman heads to find the old lady, unknowingly starting off a chain of events that plunge her nearest and dearest into peril, as Death finally comes to finish what it started so many years ago.

Wonderfully frightening and familiar, Bloodlines brings you everything you want from a Final Destination film, while also extended the overarching story of the series and actually answering some questions that fans such as myself have wanted to know since the start. The film also offers horror icon Tony Todd a fitting final goodbye, and many will find his storyline all the more emotional knowing how imminent his own death was.

The cast are all excellent and as in so many of the previous parts, they go through as much psychological torture as physical. Like the figures of ancient myths and legends who were outcast for their ability to see the future, Stefani is treated like a freak even by her own family as so many other Final Destination protagonists have before her.

Most importantly Final Destination: Bloodlines is packed with gore-filled, fantastically constructed deaths, that are far more fucked up than any freak accidents you have ever seen before. So much of the fun in these films is found by trying to work out what will kill each character, and still being surprised and sickened when you actually see it.

Slotting in alongside all the other equally excellent episodes, Bloodlines cements Final Destination as the franchise all other horrors should study if they want to keep people engaged, entertained and downright petrified for a quarter of a century and counting.

Movie Rating:

Final Destination: Bloodlines trailer

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