There is something wrong with enjoying this.

I walked out halfway through. That’s a disservice, I know — reviewing a film without seeing its full arc. But I also suffered thru The Substance, and maybe that altered my glorified view of “completion.”

Final Destination: Bloodlines is the culmination of a disturbing trend in modern horror: gore as gratification, suffering as spectacle.

Studios keep misreading the room. They seem to believe that gore = entertainment. That anguish equals amusement. My theater was laughing during the opening — not because it was clever or earned, but because the film begged them to. The laughter felt revolting. Forced. Desperate. Like the peel of psychotic laughter echoing through an asylum.

A character clutches a cracked glass floor — and from a wide shot, it’s already uncomfortable. Then the film cuts to a tight close-up of his fingers being mangled. There’s no thrill, no tension — just a forced, lingering cruelty.

Or consider the scene where a piano hovers before mincing a terrified woman. These aren’t creative kills. They’re executions; prolonged & self-satisfied. And the fault lies not only in the imagery but in the writing, the direction and the performances.

The film opens with a mass-death premonition — as usual for the franchise — this time involving a CGI penny dropped into a ventilation shaft, triggering mechanical chaos and a body count. The penny reappears later, rocketing into someone’s skull in what I assume was meant to be humorous. It wasn’t.

The acting feels artificial. These are actors acting. A lounge singer finishes her set, walks offstage, and speaks to her son — not like a mother, but like someone performing “motherliness.” Same goes for a romantic proposal. It’s a man and woman playing “couple,” nothing more.

Cruel or sadly sympathetic

Every character falls into one of those two roles — the maitre d, the fat bully, the pompous rich guy. The film’s solution? Impalements. Crushings. Combustions. Some of the deaths involve slow, sadistic injury before the final blow, all layered with awkward attempts at humor.

We watch two young boys die — both the bully and the singer’s son. Neither scene provokes laughter or catharsis. Just darkness.

When the protagonist wakes from the premonition, hostility greets her. And when she seeks answers, the film drags us into its convoluted mythology.

Apparently, the lead’s grandmother thwarted Death decades earlier when she received a vision — a recording from some mysterious counterforce. God? Life? Who knows. The lore now implies a cosmic tug-of-war: Life broadcasts future disasters into human minds, and Death retaliates years later through dream replays and delayed punishment.

So the lead visits Grandma in her anti-Death fortress. “Death’s a bitch,” she says. The audience laughs on cue. She explains the entire nightmare was her premonition from years ago. One she acted on by physically stealing the penny and interrupting a band mid-performance of “Shout” to evacuate the dance floor.

De-elevated

It’s absurd. Not surreal, not satirical — just absurd. A story written with shallow instincts and executed with no trust in the audience’s intelligence.

The survivors all died anyway, Grandma says. Her husband too. Just not in the grotesque fashion we were forced to endure. And now Death has finally caught up to her too.

“Cancer’s a bitch,” she shrugs, popping pills. Laughter erupts again. I hit the eject button on my seat and rocketed out the auditorium.

This isn’t storytelling. It’s just sadism in camp disguise. I read the rest on Wikipedia and felt vindicated in walking out.

Don’t see this. There’s no merit here — not in the writing, the acting or the themes. Just more surface-level suffering in a franchise long past relevance.

I imagine the original is worth revisiting. I recall it having an organic progression — a sense that events unfolded with eerie inevitability. But when the sequels were released in theaters, the franchise had already devolved into an unjustified list of killings. So what explains the acclaim for this one? Bloodlines holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Even IMDb has it at 7.1. Am I the psychotic? Are these people simple — or am I too close-minded I can’t accept what passes for good now?

★ ★

Read my briefer analysis on IMDb or Letterboxd. Or Jurassic World: Rebirth for more needless rehash. Maybe see Clown in a Cornfield instead, or The Conjuring: Last Rites for stronger horror.