FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES
Horror franchises are noted for their unkillable villains, constantly being resurrected, but the Final Destination films cut to the chase in that the villain is death itself, and who is going to kill him? Or her. Or them.
The films settle for ‘him’, but retain an ambiguity about the personhood of death: on one level they portray death as a kind of ‘force’, like gravity, and on the other as an entity, struggling to keep up with a ‘schedule’, and betraying clear signs of possessing a sense of humour.
Of course such confusion is perfectly apt, as death is not something we can readily get our heads around as a species. Which could be the main reason the horror genre exists at all.
The latest film starts with a bravura sequence set in the 1960’s detailing the collapse of an architecturally improbable revolving restaurant called the Skyview. Which, in the way of these films, does not actually happen: what we are witnessing, in great detail, is a premonition experienced by one diner, Iris (Brec Bassinger) who is subsequently able to prevent the disaster from occurring.
This naturally annoys death, who we may picture heaving a sigh and preparing to track down the survivors. And, in this case, their children, and their children’s children. After all, ‘dead people’ shouldn’t by rights be spawning.
Though it doesn’t say much for death’s efficiency that he hasn’t got round to dispatching them sooner. Perhaps this is because he is spending too much time arranging eye-catching demises for them, instead of just, say, letting them expire from routine medical issues, which would be depressing for the audience.
The opening premonition doubles as a recurring nightmare afflicting Stefani, Iris’ grandaughter (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). In the present day, Iris (now Gabrielle Rose) is estranged from her family and holed up in what amounts to a survivalist compound (population: one) where she hopes to evade death’s attentions.
However, the nightmares are a warning that death has finally got round to catching up with the family, inspiring Stefani to dig into her family history and seek out her grandmother, who provides some tips on avoiding the Grim Reaper before succumbing to a ‘freak accident’. Of course her guidance utterly fails to prevent an escalating health and safety nightmare in which overactive lawnmowers, dustcarts and even an MRI machine all play their allotted part.
Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B.Stein manage it all with a persuasive glee that overrides – or celebrates – all the contradictory elements: death as both an inevitability and yet shocking, death bringing families closer together by destroying them. Which are, in any case, not really contadictions in the script (by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts) but ironies attendant upon our experience of death.
There is no spiritual or supernatural element here beyond the evocation of death as a kind of unseen character. Avoiding death is a skill likened to ‘a kind of math’ but in practice it doesn’t work.
Although at the end a ‘get-out clause’ is evoked, and a happy ending appears to be in store, except – well, you’ll find out.
BOGANCLOCH
I can confidently say that I was the only person hastening from a screening of Final Destination: Bloodlines at the Curzon Aldgate to the latest film by documentary film maker Ben Rivers at the ICA; yet there did seem to be some synergy between FD:B and Bogancloch.
It’s a sequel for a start. Not that I’ve seen Two Years at Sea, Rivers’ previous film to take as its subject Jake Williams, who has chosen to live ‘off grid’ in a junk-strewn rambling shack in a Scottish forest.
From what I have read this seems to be quite similar to its predecessor, as Rivers observes Williams about his chores or dozing off in the forest or – in one of the more action-packed sequences – visiting a local school to demonstrate the workings of the solar system to some bemused kids using a modified pub garden umbrella advertising McEwans Lager.
In the end, he has a bath. Outside, in the snow, in a bathtub with a fire underneath it.
Fresh from FD:B, I was conscious of the probability that Williams’ habitat hadn’t been properly risk-assessed but I needn’t have worried: nothing happens. Often the liveliest aspect of the whole thing is the flickering and jumping of the film stock; which is not necessarily a bad thing.
His cluttered abode couldn’t help but remind me of the remote hideout of the heroine’s grandmother in FD:B (which ironically looked like a deathtrap). Had she been anything other than a relatively minor character in a mainstream horror movie, one would have been forced to wonder what her entirely solitary life spent evading death (but also life) might have been like.
Quite pleasant, perhaps. Certainly, Williams seems happy enough.
Although at one point it looks like Ben Rivers is too entranced by swirling patterns of smoke to let his subject know that the house is on fire, let alone do anything about it. But it is just the chimney smoking. Or something.
The view here is often obscured by fog, snow, smoke, so that there is almost a sense of us not being meant to witness this, as if Williams were like the proverbial tree that falls down in the forest – would any of this even have happened if Ben Rivers hadn’t been there to film it? Always bearing in mind, of course, that not much does happen. There is no (SPOILER ALERT) accident, fatal or otherwise.
Sometimes the monochrome imagery breaks out in colour to depict photos of Williams’ previous life and travels, and music, which could be Arabic, plays from cassettes, contrasting with the bleak visuals and lending a further air of mystery to the film.
At the end Williams is visited by folk singers (one of whom – Alasdair Roberts – is a bone fide celeb, at least as far as Scottish folk musicians go) who join Williams to perform a song around the fire, one that conveys an argument between life and death over which of them owns the world, a disagreement staged more explicitly in the Final Destination films.
Though, like FD:B, Bogancloch proves to have up its own bravura effects sequence up it’s sleeve when, at the end, the camera soars above Williams in his snowbound bath, up up up towards the stars.
Yes OK, Rivers has just put his camera on a drone but in the context of what we have just seen it’s a considerable technological and stylistic leap: it is Rivers’ very own ‘Skyview’.
But the towering restaurant in FD:B is a provocation, just daring death to intervene. This is, maybe, more about acceptance, life and death in balance, no argument after all. Though it feels less like cosmic harmony than a chilly distance which ultimately seems to elide even Rivers himself, in as much as his presence was ever apparent here.
THE SHROUDS
David Cronenberg is also known for maintaining a chilly distance from his subjects but he is far from being an absence in his films: the distance is part of what constitutes the Cronenbergian, though it does not rule out a perverse humour, among other things.
The premise of his latest (seen at the Prince Charles) is very Cronenbergian – the idea that people (specifically protagonist Karsh, played by Vincent Cassell) may find it comforting to observe their late loved ones’ bodily disintegration in the grave, and thus will pay a fortune for their corpses to be surveilled by cameras fitted in high-tech ‘shrouds’. Here, it seems, life definitely has embraced death.
British director John Williams’ 2023 film Watch Me Sleep had a similar premise though there it was less technologically sophisticated, in keeping with the budget. Watching that, I didn’t find it very plausible that anyone would derive comfort from watching their late loved ones decay, let alone pay for it; but if anyone would, my money would be on Cronenberg.
The concept certainly makes more sense here, where it is presented as a high-end quirk of the super-rich, rather than something arranged by a bloke down the pub.
And there is that sense of humour. Widower Karsh’s first date following his bereavement flounders when he takes the woman to visit his wife’s grave – whose headstone incorporates a screen displaying her skeleton – and declares his intention of being buried in the neighbouring plot. There is no second date.
Karsh, the inventor of this tech, subsequently pursues a relationship with a blind client Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), before being distracted by his wife’s sister Terry (Diane Kruger), who looks an awful lot like his wife Becca (also Diane Kruger). Meanwhile he has dreams in which Becca keeps leaving the bed they share and returning later with bits missing.
There is also a lot of other stuff going on involving Karsh’s dubious brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce) who seems to be involved with ‘the Russians’ and/or ‘the Chinese’, who may have an interest in Karsh’s tech. Someone, possibly eco-protesters, has vandalised Karsh’s cemetery and there is also the possibility that Becca was being experimented on by her oncologist (and former lover) – although strange growths seen on her skeleton may have been added digitally. Even Karsh’s AI assistant ‘Hunny’ is not what she seems.
It’s quite involving but obscure, as Cronenberg doesn’t seem to be interested in resolving any of these plot strands, so that you end up with a lot of competing conspiracy theories. Though that does feel true to our times.
In the end, Karsh goes off in a plane to shack up with Soo-Min in Budapest, but then she starts losing body parts in the manner of his wife in the dreams, so maybe we can conclude that we are in one of these – at which point the film itself (unexpectedly) concludes. But I suppose it’s only right that in a film about death the end should come too soon. As for those unresolved elements, we just have to let them go.
And yet I would watch this again, if there’s time.
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