Final Destination: Bloodline (15) |Close-Up Film Review
Dirs: Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, US/Canada, 2025, 110 mins
Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Brec Bassinger, Teo Briones
Review by .Carol Allen
For those who are unacquainted with it the premise of the franchise is a group of people, who are destined to die in some sort of disaster but by a quirk of fate avoid it. Death however cannot be cheated and sooner rather than later they will all meet their fate, usually in rather horrible ways.
The film opens with a brilliantly impressive sequence which surpasses the disaster movies of the seventies. Way back in the sixties 17 year old Iris (Brec Bassinger) and her fiancé Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) attend the opening of a posh new restaurant at the top of very, very tall tower. Iris is a bit wary of the height because, it turns out, she’s pregnant and worried that she’s going to be sick. Paul is delighted when he learns of the pregnancy and proposes on the spot. Their joy however is short lived. Iris has a premonition something bad is going to happen and she’s right. The glass floor on which they are dancing cracks, a gas heater explodes and the building collapses in spectacular fashion killing everyone.
In the present student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) wakes from a nightmare – the nightmare we’ve just seen. But when she tells her family, it turns out her dream happened for real to her grandma Iris. But in real life Iris succeeded in warning everyone in time and they escaped. Once her children were older, Grandma, the family tell her, became a recluse. Stefani tracks her down and Iris (now played by Gabrielle Rose) tells her that Death began killing the survivors and their descendants, because they should never have existed. She’s kept a huge cuttings file on the deaths. But as long as she stays alive, so will her bloodline.
However Grandma makes the bad mistake of stepping outside with her granddaughter and immediately meets a grotesquely sticky end. And so one by one do the members of her bloodline – a series of inventive and bloody deaths while Stefani and her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) desperately try to find ways of cheating the grim reaper.
It’s all rather like a puzzle or a video game in a way. Who’s going to get it next and how? It’s an inventive and clever premise, which holds the attention, is totally consistent in its development and very entertaining.
