If the defining tone of the most successful “Final Destination” films can be boiled down to “unsettling, but silly,” Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s “Final Destination Bloodlines” maintains that balance as well as any installment before it.

Fourteen years after “Final Destination 5” supposedly brought the horror franchise full circle, Lipovsky and Stein skillfully expand its scope to accommodate an interconnected universe where Death steadily attempts to reclaim victims across multiple generations. While a canonically satisfying sendoff to the late Tony Todd’s William Bludworth bolsters the series’ morbid gravitas, a cast of playful, mostly likable 20-somethings keep proceedings light in juxtaposition to the filmmakers’ fiendishly inventive kills.

After awaking from recurrent visions in which her grandmother Iris dies during the opening of a 1960s Space Needle-type landmark, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) leaves college to address the relentless insomnia that’s wrecking her stellar academic career. Stefani’s...