Bloodlines is a masterful continuation of the Final Destination franchise, at once a loving homage to the original films and a bold new direction for the series. At first it looks like it might be a period piece, since it begins in 1969, with the opening of the Sky View Restaurant, a Space Needle-styled venue in a Midwestern American city. We experience it from the perspective of Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger), a young woman attending the opening with her beau. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein draw heavily on the American technological sublime, along with mid-century technologies of perception, to craft a pinnacle of panoptic modernity – glass floors, glass walls, glass everywhere. These queasy, glassy, glossy perspectives produce the lushest mise-en-scene in the franchise so far and are compounded by the IMAX cinematography used here and at key other moments in the film. The aspect ratio of IMAX, in particular, harkens back to the mid-century widescreen moment, which the directors also signal by way of the very first image – a pair of train tracks, shock in an impossibly panoramic frame, extending out into the distance.

Of course, since this building is sublime, it also contains an element of terror, which we first glimpse when Iris ascends to the viewing platform at the very pinnacle of the structure. It’s here that the building starts to shudder and heave, reflecting one of the franchise’s perennial preoccupations: the utter indifference of infrastructure to human lives. Iris, like Final Destination protagonists before her, has a vision of the Sky View Restaurant collapsing into its own panoramic aspirations – tilting vertiginously on its side, so that people tumble down onto the glass walls, the only threshold preventing them from falling to the ground below. In the last stages of its arc, only Iris herself is left at the top, framed by a lurid purple-red sunset, before she too succumbs to the collapse of the building. During these sequences, the directors move brilliantly between macro and micro scales – we continually shift between the broad spectacle of the building with the passage of two objects: the wedding ring that Iris’ beau uses to propose and the penny that sets the destruction in motion.

This prologue doesn’t merely immerse us in mid-century spectacle but in a mid-century sense of occasion and public space, in order to build a thesis about the public sphere in contemporary America. When we shift back to the present, we get the most mythology since the original, making for a film that is a little less driven by kill scenes than the other sequels, and a little more propulsive in its narrative and world-building. At first, there is no clear connection between Iris and Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who begins having vivid dreams about the fall of the Sky View Restaurant. However, Stefani gradually tracks down her reclusive grandmother, Iris (now played by Gabrielle Rose), who reveals that her premonition saved everyone who should have died in the restaurant that day. With so many survivors to work through, whole new families have emerged before Death has finished the job – families, Iris reminds Stefani, who were never meant to exist. Stefani’s dream is the first sign that her family is the next on the list; slowly but inexorably, Death has finally worked its way back to them, like an illness that is passed down genetically. This produces an interesting riff on the original franchise, which was above all preoccupied with what Richard Grusin has described as premediation – the obsession, post-911, of imagining every possible form of future catastrophe that might beset the American public sphere, in order to preempt and forestall it (released in 2000, the first film, in particular, uncannily anticipates this structure of feeling that would emerge from the September 11 attacks). By contrast, Bloodlines asks its characters to track down a premediatory past from an apparently resolved present, and asks its audience to imagine how the lingering affects of the post-911 era might remain present in the daily lives of Americans.

At the same time, Bloodlines speaks to a new era of precarity and to the hypervigiliance needed to simply engage with the post-Trumpian public sphere in America. The directors brilliantly evoke a world where risk perpetually flickers at the periphery of vision, just below the threshold of consciousness, in a rhythm that feels coterminous with ambient social media but is also embedded in the material world (hats blowing off, a kid about to throw pennies in the air). Iris’ very name reflects the need for a new panoptic vigilance, and when Stefani finally tracks her down, it’s to a compound that she hasn’t left in twenty years for fear that public space offers too many contingencies for Death to weaponise. Of course, Iris’ property isn’t entirely safe either but at least she’s mapped out every possible variable of her house. In order to prove the truth of the premediatory prophecy to Stefani she does the unthinkable – she crosses the threshold of the house and immediately succumbs to Death.

Iris’ lesson for Stefani opens up a new trope for the franchise: “reading” spaces obsessively for potential risks. This has always been a component of the series for audiences but Lipovsky and Stein’s characters now inhabit a world that they have to navigate as if it were a Final Destination film; scanning every space for contingencies is now simply part and parcel of American life: “It’s like an equation – it’s like Math.” Since the family lineage means that Stefani can reasonably predict the next victim (although there are still a few surprises) the focus shifts from who is going to die next to where they’re going to die, producing the recurring motif of the film: characters moving gingerly and carefully through space, checking every coordinate and variable. Beyond a certain point, there’s nothing to do in public space except freeze or else retreat to total isolationism: “So we just lock ourselves in a cabin forever?” Likewise the recurring symbol of the coin suggests that venturing into the American public sphere has rehabilitated the medieval idea of the Wheel of Fate (and there is a medieval-like grimness to the death scenes too; the violence is usually drastic, sudden and facial). As the characters move through space precariously (one of the best scenes involves Stefani obsessively “mapping” every risk factor in her backyard) so they move through time, second by second, culminating with a poignant and improvised reflection from a terminally ill Tony Todd to “enjoy every single second” since “life is precious.”

Amidst this mileu, objects take on an even more uncanny, malign and networked sentience than ever before in the franchise, until the standoff with Death becomes a standoff against the contingencies of the physical world. This universe of objects turned against humans evokes the onset of AI and the dawn of a true internet of things, while also allowing the directors to visualise Death’s agency in new and innovative ways. One of the most memorable scenes in this respect occurs in a hospital MRI room. After Death activates the MRI magnet, a phone flies out of a character’s hand and onto the “on” button. From there, all the piercings and rings in another character’s body are drawn to the machine, with horrific results, while the magnet sends a rippling force field across the hospital that echoes the depiction of Death as the wind in earlier films. That windy imagery also remains here and reminded me, more than ever before, of Christian Keathley’s use of the “wind in the trees” as a cipher for the cinephilic attachment to material contingencies in the film image that seem irrelevant to the narrative focus. The characters of Bloodlines find themselves compelled to rehabilitate this cinephilic lens to survive the American public sphere, so it feels right that the film has also rejuvenated the franchise, with new instalments on the way.