16 May,2025 03:31 PM IST | Mumbai | Johnson Thomas
Still from Final Destination: Bloodlines
The Grim Reaper's sixth entry in 25 years of this horror franchise, presents a series of ingeniously designed fatalities that feel real and therefore makes you wary of what's in store once you walk out of the theatre.
This entry comes 14 years after the last one but it's never too late as they say. Death is the protagonist, and causality is the myth which magnifies commonplace anxieties shadowed in morbid allure. This film has the power to turn you into a nervous wreckâ¦provided you are taken in by its incredibly outrageous story telling craft.
The opening scene itself sets the ball rolling. It's 1969, a young couple, Iris (Brec Bassinger) and Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), arrive for dinner at a restaurant located atop a tall tower. It doesn't take long for disaster to follow. Hordes of guests at the restaurant lose their lives in the most gruesome of ways while "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" keeps playing in the background. That was actually a premonition experienced by Iris and it helped save dozens of lives. Years later, her granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) suffers from recurring nightmares of the same event.
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She visits her now elderly grandmother (Gabrielle Rose), who explains to her that by saving the lives of everyone at the tower, she cheated death, and ever since the grim reaper has devoted itself to systematically killing not only the survivors but also their descendants which also includes Stefani and her family members. Stefani Reyes, in fact, leaves college to address the relentless insomnia that's wrecking her academic career.
The story, of course doesn't make much sense but the manner in which Directors Adam Stein, Zach Lipovsky, Screenwriters Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and director of photography Christian Sebaldt ply it on, every moment feeling nervous and fraught with anxiety. Death steadily attempts to reclaim victims across multiple generations.
Iris' doomsday scenario sounds unlikely to Stefani but she quickly discovers that at least some of her grandmother's theories are true. Stefani enlists her brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and cousins to help combat the cosmic forces but it's not as simple as that. Stefani is forced to undertake drastic measures to halt the deadly chain of events. The characters get documented proof of the multi-generations of lives lost and dangerous situations pile up as the homicides increase.
It's not all gruesome and gory though. There's a comic cheeky vein that runs through this series and that's what keeps it going. The premonition curse has been passed down in silly, bloody reverence towards a legacy, where the connective tissue between kills need not be taken too seriously.
The foreboding silliness begins when we hear Johnny Cash sing about walking into a burning ring of fire as the film inches towards the funniest bloodbath we've experienced in this franchise. It's a nihilistic crowd-pleaser and works in both funny and gruesome ways. This sixth chapter embraces the knowingly silly premise and grisly thrills keeping the franchise yardsticks in mind.
The core cast is effective while the plotting gets inventive. Santa Juana's Stefani does trepidation quite well, Richard Harmon's turn as Stefani's cousin Erik is good and the late Tony Todd's William Bludworth lends validity to the multi-generational morbidity that this edition is hooked on.
