The Final Destination series is founded on set pieces. Whenever Death stalks a doomed teenager, we’re treated to a series of close-ups of seemingly innocuous details of their environment, poised to turn deadly when taken in combination with other innocuous but combustible details. The resulting five-minute sequence, known as a set piece, makes us giggle and squirm until the tension is finally released through someone getting their head knocked off – often, as the series went along, in ways that were increasingly more difficult to telegraph from the clues provided.

Final Destination: Bloodlines, the franchise’s first entry since Final Destination 5 in 2011, starts with not only the most lavish and complicated set piece in the history of the franchise, but also one of the best set pieces you are likely to see anywhere. That may be rather extreme praise for the sixth entry in a horror franchise, but the opening of Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein’s movie earns exaggerated kudos based on the way it thrills and drops jaws. It involves one of those mid-century futurist towers, the type with a thin central shaft and a saucer-shape observation deck at the top, during its grand opening, which will not go well for anyone attending. And that’s all that we should really say about it, except “Wow.” It’s so ornate, both in terms of set design and staging, that it takes about four times the typical five-minute allotment for such a set piece.

Travelling back into the past (the late 1960s) is just one of the ways Bloodlines announces itself as a deviation from the previous movies. Another is that instead of the slate of potential victims being a bunch of teenage friends, at least one of whom is going to step in front of an inexplicably speeding bus, they are members of a family, the descendants of a woman (Brec Bassinger) who had a vision of the disaster that was going to claim lives at Skyview Tower. Because she prevented those people from dying, Death is coming back to finish the job, not only on the people who shouldn’t have survived that day, but on their children and grandchildren who should never have been born.

The main one we’re following from that last group is Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a university student recently placed on academic probation because the nightmares she’s having of this tower disaster are awakening her every night. Determined to do something about it (and basically kicked out by her roommate), Stef returns home to her family to start poking around about her grandmother Iris, who she instinctively knows is at the centre of this vision, even though she’s never met her. She’s never met her because her mother and her uncle extracted themselves from Iris’ life after Iris became a crazy person holed up in a safe house in the woods, spouting theories about Death’s design – the kind of bequeathed mental poisoning that also caused Stef’s own mother (Rya Kihlstedt) to walk out on her and her brother some ten years ago.

None of Stef’s family – brother Charlie (Teo Briones), father Marty (Tinpo Lee), uncle Howard (Alex Zahara), aunt Brenda (April Telek) and cousins Erik, Julia and Paul (Richard Harmon, Anna Lore and Max Lloyd-Jones) – believe in her ravings, and see yet another generation of mental instability brought on by Iris and her delusions. Of course, they can’t ignore Stef’s conclusion that they are doomed, once they start succumbing to gruesome, Rube Goldbergian deaths, in exactly the order Stef predicted.

From the plot synopsis, it should be clear that Bloodlines is not fundamentally, or even very superficially, different from the movies that preceded it in the series. The explanation for why it seems fresh, after the previous movies were offering seriously diminishing returns, is twofold. One: It’s been 14 years since we’ve had a Final Destination movie, though we did have a very similar sort of movie earlier this year with Oz Perkins’ The Monkey. (Which may have successfully whetted our appetites for this one.) Two: Lipovsky and Stein are really good at this. Their execution of that opening is nothing short of visionary, almost a short film unto itself, such that meeting the characters we’re going to spend the rest of the movie with is almost a disappointment. Until they do good things with those characters as well, not only getting good performances from the cast of mostly unknowns, but making the most of the mordant humour built into the script by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Spider-Man director Jon Watts.

The simple decision to use the members of a family, rather than the members of a teenage friend group, pays huge dividends in terms of differentiating this from the interchangeable lot of slasher movies out there. It also adds some pathos in between all the viscera. While individual teenagers in other movies, often characterised as a bit naff, are generally disposable, causing only one lot of pain and anguish for each family, the deaths here are more poignant because they are taking out, well, the bloodlines of this family. Not only this family, but all the others who were in that doomed tower.

And the set pieces are as delicious as ever. The directors stimulate our anticipation expertly, providing close-ups of the props and other dangers of everyday life that normally go unrealised. A person could spend time talking about these little details, but it’s better to let them unfold through an actual viewing. Though if you ever wanted to know all the ways body piercings might factor into a person’s untimely demise, Bloodlines has got you covered.

The film also features the final screen performance from franchise icon Tony Todd, veteran of four of the previous five entries, for whom Death did finally come last year at age 69. The stomach cancer that did ultimately claim him was pretty advanced when he shot this, amplifying the series’ underlying notion and an immutable fact of nature: Death gets us all in the end.

 

Final Destination: Bloodlines opened yesterday in cinemas.