In Review: 'Final Destination Bloodlines,' 'Sister Midnight'

Horror two ways this week as a franchise favorite returns after a 14-year break and an Indian film reaches for instant cult status.

Final Destination Bloodlines
Dir. Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
110 min.

Tired: God has a plan for us. 
Wired: Death has a plan for us. 

If horror films tend to reflect the anxieties of the times, what to make of the Final Destination series? The notion of Death as an antagonist wasn’t new to cinema, but Death’s presence as a faceless, pitiless orchestrator of mechanized destruction suggested a new level of futility at the hands of fate. In the past, you could play chess with the Grim Reaper (The Seventh Seal) or argue yourself off the inventory list (A Matter of Life and Death), but in the Final Destination movies, it’s a cruel inevitability, even if you happen to figure out its internal logic. Were it not for the creative, Rube Goldberg effects of getting thwacked by the cargo of a runaway logging truck or sluiced into pieces by a barbed-wire fence, the series would make plain what we already know: That Death comes for us all, and is thus history’s most prolific serial murderer. Fight as these characters do, they’re all staving off a cruel inevitability that comes for us all. 

A cynic would say that Idiocracy predicted the box-of-rocks simplicity of future moviegoers gathering to see a film called Ass—please, Mike Judge, it will be much cheaper and more convenient to watch Ass at home—but it’s nonetheless remarkable that we’re now six movies deep in a series built around the same basic stimulant. While every Final Destination movie has characters who spot Death’s pattern and scramble to evade it, the movies are all more or less as good as their most inspired kills, which makes comparing entries feel like ranking your favorite OK Go videos. But whether it’s the welcome 14-year break between sequels or the IMAX amplification of the budget, Final Destination Bloodlines is the strongest entry to date, following the expected formula with clever misdirection and plenty of pizzazz. 

The giggles start in the opening sequence, which follows the franchise dictate of kicking off the fireworks display with the grand finale. In 1968, at the opening of an immense, pointy tower that is definitely not the Seattle Space Needle—and shame on you for thinking that—a young couple ascends an elevator that’s beyond capacity to a restaurant called the Skyview, completed several weeks ahead of schedule and perhaps before the bolt and glass inspectors could give it a final pass. All sorts of gruesome tragedy ensues until we realize that the event is just a particularly vivid nightmare visited upon Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college freshman courting academic probation. The woman in Stefani’s dream is her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Rose), who’s long been exiled from the family from her delusional insistence that Death is coming to get her and all of her descendants. The logic? She was supposed to die in 1968, which means that her children and grandchildren should not exist. 

 So begins Stefani’s mad dash to convince the slack-jawed dingbats in her family that it’s not a coincidence that they’re all dying off one by one. Much like her grandmother, Stefani has the gift of prescience to anticipate the gusts of wind and errant soccer-ball kicks that might lead to the next garbage-compactor beheading, but she can only do so much. Once Final Destination Bloodlines gets rolling, it connects one set piece after another that reliably builds suspense through fake-outs and close calls before bringing the hammer down in a Looney Tunes sploosh of digital blood. That’s one thing Death in the abstract has over mortal-ish slasher types like Michael or Jason: It doesn’t have to turn to a butcher knife when the business end of a lawnmower or an MRI machine will do. What a way to go!  — Scott Tobias

Final Destination Bloodlines opens tonight in theaters everywhere. It may be worth that IMAX surcharge. Life can be short, after all.

Sister Midnight
Dir. Karan Kandhari
110 min.

It’s clear from the beginning of Sister Midnight that Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) are destined to have a short honeymoon. Uma’s a newcomer to Mumbai, brought there by Gopal after their arranged marriage. A stranger to the city who’s seemingly repelled at the very idea of city life, Uma is equally uninterested in learning what’s expected of her as a spouse. Sheetal (All We Imagine as Light’s Chhaya Kadam), her next-door-neighbor in the crowded row of shacks that make up Uma’s new neighborhood, teaches her some cooking basics, but a full belly doesn’t allow her to hold Gopal’s attention or lift either partner’s mood. Mostly, Uma sits and sulks. Then she contracts a mysterious illness. Then she takes a cleaning job and starts staying out at night. Then her life takes some truly strange turns.

A wild cult film trojan-horsed into what briefly resembles a marital drama, Karan Kandhari’s feature debut sometimes plays like a collection of crazy moments strung together, but the film’s punkish spirit and Apte’s winning performance prove more than enough to keep it compelling. (Napoleon Stratogiannakis’s razor sharp editing and Sverre Sørdal’s striking, shadow-drenched cinematography deserve special mention, too.) As Uma’s discontent grows, her behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable. Or maybe it’s not that unpredictable. No one ever says the word “vampire,” but what else explains her desire to suck the blood from birds and other creatures who then return to life in the form of cute, dubious-looking special effects creations?

Sister Midnight might seem merely weird for the sake of being weird if Uma’s metamorphosis, and Apte’s performance, didn’t keep it purposeful. Uma might be comically ill-suited for marriage, but the many prompts that make her disappointment curdle into rage understandable—from Gopal’s distance to prying neighbors to garbage-lined streets—keep the film pointed even at its most freewheeling. It also gives added depth to the connections Uma manages to form outside her marriage. These include her friendship with Sheetal (whose marriage does seem happy, for all her sourness) but also the sunny sex worker Uma passes on her way home, who first takes an interest in Uma because she wants to know what whitening cream she uses to keep her skin so pale. That it’s not a beauty secret, strictly speaking, that gives Uma that look counts as one of Sister Midnight’s slier jokes. Some looks aren’t so easy to replicate, or to reverse. —Keith Phipps

Sister Midnight opens in limited release tonight before expanding.