Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) is directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein, and written by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor. It stars Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Richard Harmon, Rya Kihlstedt, Teo Briones, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Alex Zahara, April Telek, Tinpo Lee, Gabrielle Rose, Brec Bassinger, Max Lloyd-Jones, and Tony Todd. When Stefani Reyes (Juana), a young college student, finds her sleep plagued by a recurring nightmare of a tragic tower collapse decades prior, she sets out to find answers. Her search eventually leads to her estranged grandmother, Iris (Rose), who reveals that the dream is a tragedy she prevented decades prior. Because so many people were saved, Death struggled to correct its design before some of the survivors had families, creating bloodlines that were never meant to exist. Now dying of cancer after keeping Death at bay for years, Iris reveals that it will soon come to claim the lives of Stefani and her siblings and won’t stop until it accomplishes its bloody goal. 

Even though the lead characters are recognizable, the actors portraying them are some of the most talented in the franchise. These performances are nothing special, but the bar is set pretty low for the franchise when it comes to acting. This time, focusing on a tight-knit family naturally breeds compelling, lived-in dynamics between the various characters. For example, the film features one relationship between brothers that is unexpectedly heartwarming (for a little while, at least). This is the only entry in the franchise that makes me sad when certain characters bite the bullet. The franchise has always featured life-or-death stakes, but this is the first entry that also features effective emotional ones. 

Besides maybe Final Destination 2 (2003), this sixth installment strikes the franchise’s best balance of comedy and horror. Featuring some of the series’s most convoluted and over-the-top deaths, the film proves, like the previous installment, that the franchise still has legs. The tone is a little too comedic for what I usually desire to see in a Final Destination movie, but I find it easy to forgive this time because the jokes land more often than not. For example, there’s one particular ‘killing babies”-related joke that could’ve easily been a disaster, but is instead a prime example of what the franchise does so well when it’s firing on all cylinders. No matter how dark things get, we’re able to laugh in a way that oddly never seems to conflict with the disturbing nature of all the violence.      

The film again relies heavily on CGI, but unlike previous installments, which feature visuals that haven’t aged well, it feels like the current technology can finally support the franchise’s large-scale ambitions regarding its convoluted horror set pieces. This allows the film to provide arguably the franchise’s best, but undoubtedly its most elaborate and carefully executed opening disaster sequence. 

The film finds a satisfying balance between following the typical formula and providing new ideas that help clean up and simplify the franchise’s famously inconsistent lore. That being said, there aren’t enough subversions of the typical formula to make this feel like anything other than just another Final Destination film. Still, diehard fans of the IP should walk away satisfied and then some.

Overall, this is, for my money, the pound-for-pound best installment in The Final Destination franchise. It features multiple of the series’ best kills and also some of its most effective jokes. The lead characters are forgettable, and the script can never entirely transcend its formulaic nature. Other than that, it pretty much succeeds in delivering everything a fan could want out of a fifth Final Destination sequel – carnage, comedy, and a few other things sandwiched in between, one of which is the final film appearance of late horror legend Tony Todd. It’s a meta, emotional farewell to one of horror’s most beloved icons, but it also fits the franchise’s themes of death being inescapable/inevitable. Sooner or later, we all have a date with death, so we’d better keep living until we run out of breath. RIP, Mr. Todd. B