"Final Destination: Bloodlines" is back to defying death

Final Destination: Bloodlines does not follow the thread of its premonitions. In fact, if you only focus on its prologue, you would never expect such a satisfying result. With a poor use of visual effects, which reflects in an equally artificial direction and acting that is at times exaggerated—as one might expect from any B-movie horror—the film begins without giving the best signals, putting the audience on alert and immediately causing them to lose confidence in the product. Then, suddenly, the protagonist Stefani wakes up. She opens her eyes during a university lecture amidst screams, gasping for breath. And, along with the long introduction of the film, her nightmare also stops—not only due to poor color correction and the fact that at some point it is evident that a character was digitally reproduced, as if it were a video game.

For weeks, Stefani, played by Kaitlyn Santa Juana, has been unable to rest without seeing in her dreams an entire building engulfed in flames and collapsing into ruins, causing a series of terrifying and painful deaths that plunge her into terror every time it's time to sleep. A persecution that the protagonist will try to put an end to when she discovers it is connected to her maternal grandmother Iris, whom she never met, who survived that same deadly incident years earlier, which continues to occur in her granddaughter's dreams and will reveal an unspeakable and inevitable fate for her entire family. If Final Destination: Bloodlines starts with what it knows how to do best—people dying from being hit by a piano, catching fire, getting scratched by broken glass, or impaling themselves on a pole—it continues with a story of blood (in every sense of the word) and family ties, following the red threads of precise and determined writing to fulfill the fate that Stefani's family has managed to escape for generations. 

While the long opening sequence of the work directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein catapults us into the most predictable of deadly consequences that can happen concerning the saga, returning with its sixth chapter after a fourteen-year break, it is when we get to Kaitlyn Santa Juana's character that the style becomes more sober—though maintaining a certain formal disorder—and the narration truly begins. Reflecting once again on how each of us is fatally tied to events beyond our control, a bigger design that the horror series has spiced with absurd atrocities, Final Destination: Bloodlines focuses on the "what could have happened?" and how, even after many years, this remains a question impossible to shake off. 

Grandmother Iris cheated death, which has decided to take its time and exact its revenge by tormenting Stefani and the rest of her family. The inevitability spoken of in Final Destination: Bloodlines is so irreparable that it leaves one petrified, with the axe constantly raised, casting a shadow over the protagonist's path, who will try, like her grandmother, to delay the inevitable event. By sketching the relationships between the various characters like drafting an authentic testament, the film is not only about disgusting and horrifically spectacular deaths. It no longer bases its entertainment solely on splatter moments, which this time are not even its strength. It is a clean writing style that goes straight to the point—the ace up the sleeve of Bloodlines, which tries to find all the tricks to play with death and succeeds throughout its entire duration. Every event falls into place without leaving anything to chance, just as the characters must confront. The legacy of evil, of one's existence against the will of a higher plan, and facing death as an enemy whose signs one learns to read, makes Final Destination: Bloodlines a work that convinces not only for its entertainment potential. The screenplay (written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor) does not reach the levels of the recent Puss in Boots 2 - The Last Wish in terms of challenging fate, but it does introduce some similar and admirable moves. Tremendously fun and in great shape, the new chapter of Final Destination is the order that death returns to establish and, in order to complete its task, is capable of clinging to anything. Even a simple penny.