Overview: The newest chapter in New Line Cinema’s bloody successful franchise takes audiences back to the very beginning of Death’s twisted sense of justice.

Plagued by a violent recurring nightmare, college student Stefanie heads home to track down the one person who might be able to break the cycle and save her family from the grisly demise that inevitably awaits them all.

Verdict: The Final Destination franchise has been one of the most consistent horror franchises throughout its now six-film run. While the fourth film, The Final Destination (2009), made at the height of Hollywood’s early 2000s 3D craze, was a notable misstep, this franchise has remained surprisingly solid, given the usual roller coaster ride of quality that’s common in other long-lived horror series.

Final Destination Bloodlines arrives 14 years after the release of Final Destination 5 in 2011. Rather than go the route of typical legacy sequels, Bloodlines isn’t particularly interested in bringing back older characters (save for the ever-present Tony Todd in his final screen appearance), instead delving into a new story that connects it with the previous five entries in one overarching narrative.

Our heroine this time is Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student plagued by terrifying dreams of a disaster that seems to have happened decades earlier involving her grandmother, Iris, as a young woman (Brec Bassinger). Stefanie tracks down Iris (Gabrielle Rose), long estranged from the family for her eccentricities and obsession with death, and discovers that she had prevented that disaster many years ago, causing a chain reaction that sent death after the survivors and their descendants to correct the timeline that Iris altered, not only involving much of Stefanie’s family, but all the characters in all the films we’ve seen up to this point.

One thing the Final Destination does so well is deliver the formula we’ve come to expect without over-complicating it. We know right from the start that death is going to come for these characters in increasingly complicated Rube Goldberg-esque chain reactions that cause gruesome, freak accident carnage. Its attempts to broaden its mythology have been relatively limited to making the lineage of death longer rather than trying to over-explain itself.

The series has historically been at its best when its deaths feel uncomfortably plausible, no matter how outlandish, as we watch each piece fall together with deadly precision. Bloodlines knows exactly what its audience wants and gives it to us: skin-crawling freak accidents, slow-building suspense, and gruesome payoffs!

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein aren’t reinventing the wheel here. They take a well-worn formula and make it feel fresh and thrilling again. By centering a family dynamic, they ratchet up the emotional stakes, creating one of the franchise’s most compelling stories and engaging casts of characters so that the deaths carry real weight.