Ready or Not (Review)
Ready or Not isn’t Playing Any Games.
I’m a huge fan of horror-comedies, so I was more than ready for Ready or Not. The film is a delightfully twisted romp built around a premise just strange enough to justify the chaos that ensues. A keen sense of humor offsets the absurdity of the situation and reveals much deeper motivations to characters that certainly didn’t need to be as fleshed out as well as they were. Underneath all of the jokes and even more blood, Ready or Not aspires to be a movie with some depth and in the end, it manages to be exactly that.
Everyone knows how harrowing it can be to meet the in-laws for the first time. Well, Grace (Samara Weaving) managed to avoid it right up until her wedding day (Mark O’Brien plays her groom). As the most recent addition to the Le Domas gaming empire, her new family requests that, for the sake of tradition, she joins them in a game at midnight. She obliges and draws a game of “Hide or Seek” from the family deck. Unbeknownst to her though, the family owes it’s fortune to a deal made by the founder of their dynasty to sacrifice anyone unfortunate enough to draw that card. What ensues is a modern version of The Most Dangerous Game as the family tries to hunt her down. These descendants are a far cry from the great white hunters of yesteryear, and they find that Grace isn’t willing to go down without a fight.
What makes Ready or Not such a good movie is that it’s not simply black and white. Of course, the family is completely in the wrong in actually trying to sacrifice someone, but there is more to it than that. If they don’t kill Grace by sunrise, then their entire family will die. On top of that, there are members of the family who aren’t so eager to carry out the task, despite the consequences. Adam Brody is especially good as the black sheep of the family. Seeming like a drunk brat at first, it’s revealed that he’s tormented by what he’s been born into and doesn’t know what to do, because, after all, they’re his family. The same goes for O’Brien who tries to help his bride the best he can without his family catching on. While there are plenty of selfish members in the family only interested in maintaining their fortune, a few are simply in it to make sure no one dies as a result of the cursed deal their patriarch made well before any of them were born. These insights make Ready or Not so much more interesting because while there is a clear cut heroine, it’s impossible to believe everyone else is pure evil.
Samara Weaving is simply incredible as Grace. The final girl has been a long-standing trope in the horror genre, but few actually fight back to the extent that she does. Grace wants to live no matter what and soon realizes that simply running isn’t going to be good enough. She doesn’t go full Rambo on her pursuers, but she’s not afraid to pull the gloves off. While her adversaries aren’t particularly good at hunting humans (one repeatedly ends up killing people who aren’t Grace), it’s not because of their incompetence that she manages to keep surviving. Like so many women, she’s greatly underestimated throughout the entire film, and by the time the family realizes their mistake, it’s too late. Grace is an incredible addition to the final girl cornerstone in the horror genre and easily one of my favorite of all time. While there’s probably little hope of a sequel, I would love to see Weaving take on more characters like this in the future, because she’s spectacular at it.
Ready or Not is very much a horror-comedy, but it’s one that grounds itself in still being a horror movie at the end of the day. That means it refrains from becoming a goofy satire and instead focuses on the characters themselves being funny either through their dialogue or their incompetence. Because of this, all the humorous moments in the film seem completely natural, as though we wouldn’t expect anything else from the eccentric group. Even as restrained as it is, there are plenty of uproarious moments, especially from Brody who steals a number of the scenes he’s in. Weaving herself is a more straightfaced character but her humor comes from the exasperation she feels as everything continues to go wrong for her. All in all, it’s a wonderful blend of horror and comedy. Something that you don’t see all too often given that so many films see the sub-genre as low hanging fruit.
I greatly enjoyed Ready or Not from its dark sense of humor to its timely commentary on just how insufferably entitled the wealthy are these days. It’s not heavy-handed though and while it puts a lot of effort into being a well-crafted film, it feels effortless. Everything comes together so well in Ready or Not that it’s hard not to have a good time even during it’s more gruesome moments. Being that it is a horror-comedy, it has no grand aspirations of being anything more than a good time for audiences. Still, it never takes that task for granted and tackles it wholeheartedly. Because of that, I strongly recommend Ready or Not for anyone looking for a great escapist film.
