I found the new Final Destination incredibly relatable for a painful reason

Warning: Spoilers for Final Destination: Bloodlines below

Final Destination successfully fostered a fear of log trucks in a generation of film fans, among various other everyday objects, and now the beloved horror franchise is back for a sixth installment.

Bloodlines, released in cinemas on May 14, sees death making its way through hundreds of survivors of what should have been a devastating accident in a sky-high restaurant and bar decades before.

In the present, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is haunted by nightmares involving her estranged grandma Iris (Brec Bassinger/Gabrielle Rose), who should have been killed in the Skyview Tower that day.

Stefani travels home to visit her family and track down Iris to discover the nature of her dreams, but she soon unravels a terrifying truth that has followed her family for generations.

That death is coming for the entire family, too.

Much of Final Destination: Bloodlines focuses on the family dynamics of our central characters, including Stefani and her brother Charlie’s (Teo Briones) mum, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), who abandoned them when they were children.

As death begins to pick off members of their family one by one, Stefani and Darlene bond while trying to save their souls.

Darlene explains to Stefani that she did want to be their mother, but after being raised by Iris and the constant, looming fear of death, having her children made her see ‘a hundred’ ways they could die.

It’s a simple line of dialogue, but it’s one that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since for one simple reason – I can sadly relate to Darlene’s fears of mortality when looking at my own children.

I found out I was pregnant with my first child the same weekend we went into lockdown during the pandemic, one of the most terrifying times of my life.

After never really thinking I would be a parent, and would instead spend my life surrounded by a menagerie of animals, I suddenly found myself dealing with the huge mental shift that comes with pregnancy, the myriad of aches and pains and sickness, and the looming prospect of a mysterious virus and the rising death toll it caused.

As someone who had suffered with depression and anxiety for more than a decade prior, social distancing, lone hospital appointments, and repeated warnings over how precious and vulnerable the life inside me was added a fresh level of fear to my everyday woes.

I spent hours most days talking myself off a ledge of spiralling panic, before not being able to and having to call my midwife for advice through floods of tears. My daughter’s birth was the most beautiful experience of my life, and yet soon after, the intrusive thoughts began, as, just like Darlene, I started to focus on every little object or chain of events that could harm the most precious human being in my life.

It became frightening to leave the house as I imagined someone stealing my car in the time it took me to leave the driver’s seat to get my baby from her seat, or someone crashing into us, or any number of tragedies occurring in the outside world.

It wasn’t until I had welcomed my second daughter that I realised just because I had fantastic births and laidback babies didn’t mean that I wasn’t suffering in a different, often misunderstood way, as my postpartum mental health plummeted.

Unlike Darlene, I didn’t run away; I sought help through a combination of speaking therapy and medication, and now those thoughts are mostly a distant whisper in my mind and don’t consume my every waking thought.

When Darlene said that she felt she had to abandon her children as she saw the pain of her younger self in her daughter’s eyes, it hit me like a slap across the face as I remembered the moment I realised my anxiety had become an issue not just for me, but for my children.

The relationship between Darlene, Stefani, and Charlie is handled beautifully within the film, with the familial dysfunction of Final Destination: Bloodlines adding a painfully relatable layer of horror to the standard blood and guts. The death scenes are extravagant, but it is the tough, heartfelt conversations that leave their mark.

It shows that it is never too late for a second chance, making Darlene’s final sacrifice for her children to give her own life to keep them safe even more heartbreaking.

Darlene’s redemption arc warmed my heart and made me thankful I had the opportunity to confront my death anxiety head-on without missing a moment of my children’s lives.

Kihlstedt’s performance as Darlene is simply mesmerising, both warm and loving towards her family, yet reserved and scared to see them hurt or for her to become hurt in the process. She perfectly embodies the complex emotions of parenting while working through trauma, and the devastating effects it can have on those around you.

The complex, messy heart of family life is front and centre of Final Destination: Bloodlines, flipping the script we’ve become used to in the beloved 00s franchise.

Yes, we still have the nightmare-fuel death scenes, sure to unlock a whole new set of phobias, but the haunting presence of familial trauma and estrangement is what really frayed my nerves when I exited the cinema.

Everyone expects to go into a Final Destination film and come out of it with a brand new set of phobias to obsess over. But with its focus on family dynamics and the weight of parenthood, Bloodlines reflected back to me something far more chilling that made it a powerful standout of the franchise.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is released in the UK on May 14

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