Ready or Not (2019)

Grace (Samara Weaving) certainly didn’t expect that marrying into the rich (through board games!), rude and rather eccentric family of Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) would end up with her spending her wedding night quite the way it’s turning out. There’s a family ritual involved everyone marrying into the family must go through, you see, so whosoever becomes part of the family has to draw a card containing the name of a game from a box. That box has been handed down through the generations and comes with a nice little story of what sounds decidedly like a family deal with the devil. Poor Grace, or lucky Grace, depending on one’s point of view, alas, draws the somewhat problematic card of “Hide and Seek”.

Nobody tells her what the special family variant of this single deadly game in the deck entails, and soon, her new family is hunting Grace through the house trying to hobble her with weapons and catch her so they can sacrifice her to Satan. Neither Alex nor his black sheep brother Daniel (Adam Brody) are quite in with this particular program, but family is difficult, and rich boys tend to lack backbone. Man, but the rich are different.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not is a pretty great example of what focussed direction, a game cast, and wonderful timing can make out of a very simple basic idea. One could hold it against the horror comedy that its social criticism isn’t terribly complicated and just a bit obvious – a problem it shares with most “the x are terrible” films - but the film does put visible effort not in the basic situation but into why in the hell anyone would take part in this thing – apart from as it will turn out very well justified fear for one’s own life – and so those family members that aren’t total caricatures make actual sense as people doing absurd and violent things for believably shitty people reasons. Which I believe to be quite an achievement to get into a film that is basically one long sequence of chases through a couple of rooms and corridors and a patch of woods with captures and reversals of fortune. It’s fascinating how small the scale of the film actually is when one thinks about it; yet the actual movie never feels small or constrained, but focussed and doing exactly what it sets out to do in the best way possible.

This is also one of the rare horror comedies to always manage to find the right split between the jokes and the suspense, often intermingling both brilliantly. There’s nary a moment where the humour stands in the way of the suspense or vice versa, leaving us with a film that is as exciting as it is funny.

In large part, this is the achievement of the lean and minimal yet very clever script and of a director duo who really make the most of the opportunities that come with this sort of thing. However, there’s also a great cast who can shift between the coarser and subtler moments of the writing with ease, adding dimension without showboating. Samara Weaving is obviously great, throwing herself into every single scene with the kind of controlled abandon that makes a great horror actress, while shifting from dry quipping to actual human emotion and back again with natural ease, but the supporting cast hits every note as wonderfully. Why, even Andie McDowell does not seem to have been made out of wood for once.


In addition to all that, Ready or Not looks rather fantastic too, making as much of wood-panelled walls and soft light as any horror film I can remember. It’s a joy to watch from start to finish, even avoiding the lame twist ending that some horror filmmakers now seem to think is mandated by law in the genre, simply wrapping up its plot in a fitting manner.