Life Comes At You Fast

The thing about the Final Destination movies is, they’re comedies now. I think it happened sometime around the third or fourth one, when New Line Cinema realized audiences were showing up to enjoy the Rube Goldberg deathtraps that form around the saps who think they’ve cheated Death by escaping their preordained fates in some disaster or other.

We never get to see Death, or find out who’s behind the incredibly detailed premotions that lead one lucky person to sound the warning, but Death is very much a character in these movies – a constant presence, biding its time until it can throw a bus at anyone who dares defy fate.

Final Destination: Bloodlines arrives fourteen years after Final Destination 5, which you’d think is a sign of hard it is to come up with a new story for this series, except that all of the Final Destination movies tell the same story. They’re structurally identical from start to finish, and the twist is that nobody minds.

The franchise is perhaps the most airtight concept in all of horror – more elastic than the Friday the 13^th movies, which always have to take place somewhere remote, and more accessible than the Halloween or Elm Street series, which come burdened with lore that has to be serviced or retconned so this latest story can happen. Even the Scream movies are struggling with thirty years of history at this point, where the whole fun of the Final Destination movies is starting fresh each time with a new group of victims forced to figure out what’s going on while we lean forward in anticipation of the elaborate ways in which they’ll get whacked.

With Bloodlines, genre veterans Zack Lipovsky and Adam Stein – working from a script developed by Spider-Man director Jon Watts – embrace that anticipation and run wild with it, positively reveling in misleads and fakeouts while setting up extremely entertaining kills.

The innovation here is that an entire family is the target, the result of their matriarch having saved a hundred or so people from dying in a spectacular elevated-restaurant disaster in 1969; ever since, we’re told, Death has been working its way through both the survivors and their descendants, who should never have been born. Now, half a century later, university student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having recurring nightmares of the Skyview incident … which turn out to be the vision her grandmother Iris Campbell (Brec Basinger) experienced on the day. That’s right: Death has finally worked its way back to the Campbells. And they’re going to have to put aside three generations of petty personal baggage if they want to survive.

It's a new challenge for the series, which previously delighted in sending Death after random assortments of classmates, colleagues and strangers; the Campbell-Reyes family can’t debate strategy for more than two minutes before someone brings up an old argument or personal slight. (Richard Harmon, as Stefani’s rebellious cousin Erik, is one of those guys who has both the best and worst idea at any given moment.) And all the squabbling means Death has more time to set up its new traps.

Lipovsky and Stein, whose 2018 thriller Freaks was a neat little riff on various comic-book storylines, are out to have a bloody good time, lining up a string of fresh faces to push in front of various hazards for our entertainment. And this does feel like the bloodiest, squishiest Final Destination movie yet, using a combination of practical and digital trickery to remind us we’re all just sacks of gristle waiting to meet the right sledgehammer. I kinda wish I’d seen this with an audience.

Nobody gets splattered in Friendship, though Tim Robinson’s sputtering volatility does make one worry the guy will huff himself into a rage stroke at any given moment. I blow hot and cold on Robinson’s whole deal; I like the guy as a performer, and his chemistry with Sam Richardson on Detroiters was genuinely sweet, but his Netflix sketch series I Think You Should Leave offered dwindling dividends, most bits culminating in Robinson’s character standing in the middle of a room, screaming he’s not the one who’s humiliated, it’s some other guy. The longer sketches, where he’s forced to power through the humiliation to get to the other side, were always more interesting to me. Watching him think is much funnier than watching him shriek.

Friendship is a movie that spends a lot of time watching Robinson think. He plays slightly awkward family man Craig, who’s maybe a little too eager to be pals with new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd), a TV weatherman who seems like a really cool guy. And Austin is up for it, at least until Craig gets a little too needy. Austin retreats, Craig dials up the charm. Or thinks he does, anyway.

Imagine I Love You, Man – an actual Paul Rudd vehicle! – directed by the Safdies, and that’s sort of what this is. (Kate Mara, as Craig’s wife Tami, has a very complex arc that could easily have been a subplot in the brothers’ Good Time.) And it’s all orchestrated with excruciating precision by director Andrew DeYoung, whose small-screen credits include the cringe comedies The Other Two and Pen15 as well as more boisterous shows like High Fidelity and Our Flag Means Death.

The ideal place to see this would have been at the Royal Alex last September with a hyped-up Midnight Madness crowd, but it plays pretty well at home too.

Speaking of TIFF premieres, All We Imagine As Light is also on disc this week! The first dramatic feature from Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia is as observant and thoughtful as her breakout documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, but with an emotional undercurrent that won’t be denied.

The film follows two nurses in Mumbai, older Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and younger Anu (Divya Prabha), whose friendship seems defined by their differences: Prabha is married, though her husband emigrated years ago, and Anu is single and outgoing, though carrying on a secret affair with a Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon). One morning, a rice cooker shows up at their door. That’s the starting point of Kapadia’s film, which accompanies its protagonists as they drift towards their futures, building a much larger world around them through delicate storytelling and naturalistic performances.

All We Imagine As Light comes to Blu-ray under the freshly renamed Criterion Premieres imprint, which was launched last year as Janus Contemporaries; the name change makes sense in terms of Criterion being the more recognizable name, I guess, but beyond that the format is the same: The movie gets an excellent 1080p/24 transfer, looking as good as it did on the big screen, but the only supplement is a polished “Meet the Filmmakers” interview with Kapadia produced for the Criterion Channel. This is one of those movies that begs for a fly-on-the-wall production documentary.

VVS Films’ Friendship BD doesn’t have any extras at all, which is a little disappointing since the US release (due from A24 August 5^th) will have a commentary, deleted scenes and a cast-and-crew Q&A. But the movie looks and sounds great, so feel free to take advantage of its much lower price point if you’re not into the whole supplemental deal.

If you are, though, you’ll love the first two featurettes on Warner’s Bloodlines 4K and Blu-ray editions (“Death Becomes Them” and “The Many Deaths of Bloodlines”) are surprisingly entertaining, celebrating the evolution of the Final Destination franchise from shock horror to overt comedy – something Lipovsky and Stein discuss at length in their audio commentary – and pointing out that the cast of this one grew up watching the earlier ones, and are therefore really excited to be dispatched as messily as possible.

It's in the third featurette, “The Legacy of Bludworth,” that things get a little more serious, taking a few minutes to bid farewell to Tony Todd, who died of stomach cancer a few months after shooting his cameo. And yes, he looks thin and frail on screen, but he still has charisma to spare, delivering a surprisingly moving little speech and leaving the franchise before Death can catch up to him. Nicely done.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment; Friendship is available on Blu-ray in Canada from VVS Films, with A24’s release to follow August 5^th in the US. And All We Imagine As Light is available on Blu-ray from Criterion.

Up next: To Catch a Thief, High Society and Clueless offer a peek at the lifestyles of the rich and aimless, and Carnal Knowledge and You Can Count on Me enter the Criterion Collection proper. Lots of good stuff there.