Seeking a hide
The poster for Ready or Not features a wedding dress-clad Samara Weaving with an ammo holster strapped across her chest. It’s a terrific, intriguing image, and yet a misleading one. It suggests that Weaving’s character Grace will be a woman of agency, retribution, and fury. But Ready or Not isn’t really that kind of movie, despite a few feints towards it: It’s essentially an abduction escape thriller. That false advertising is not really inherently a complaint, but I think it reflects a problem at the core of the film that it survives but doesn’t quite transcend: Radio Silence can’t decide just what kind of flavor of fun it wants Ready or Not to be.
Let me reframe that a bit more positively: Ready or Not is a damn fun movie in a bunch of different, slightly contradictory ways. It intermittently has the light, funny tone of a horror-comedy, the gnarly violence of a slasher, the sadism of an exploitation flick, and an absolute corker of a final scene that serves as a gruesome punchline. It’s a remarkably slick and polished film, which surprises me given that Radio Silence’s last feature film, Devil’s Due, was a ratty found footage flick. (The real surprise is not just Ready or Not’s significantly more professional look and feel, but that they somehow did it on a smaller budget than Devil’s Due.)
Ready or Not takes place over the wedding day and night of Grace and her husband Alex (Mark O’Brien). Grace is a former foster kid, and Alex is a billionaire heir to a toys and games company, though the movie makes quite clear that Grace isn’t in it for the money. Post-nuptials, Alex reveals to Grace that his family has a tradition of gathering to play a game together following weddings. The new in-law must draw a card with the name of a game on it and play a round before being officially inducted into the Le Domas clan (and trust fund).
What Alex doesn’t mention is that one of the games that appears on the card — hide and seek — has a murderous bent to it. The seekers (everyone in the Le Domas family) must kill the hider (Grace). Of course, if she draws any other card — checkers or tic-tac-toe, etc. — it’s just a normal parlor game. Any guesses which card Grace draws?
The rest of the movie follows Grace trying to escape one weapon-toting billionaire after another. There’s a repeated joke (in fact one of the movie’s only real jokes) that these rich nincompoops don’t know how to use their weapons, and repeatedly inadvertently maim or kill one of the workers in the house. (Class warfare — get it?)
The cast is game: Andie MacDowell is great as the icy mother-in-law, and Adam Brody is downright fantastic as the brother-in-law who is the only one wondering whether this family tradition is maybe a bit fucked up. (I’m always down for a Seth Cohen appearance.) But the show really belongs Weaving, who makes an instant claim as a great scream queen. She’s agile and physical on screen, but not to the point that we ever question if she’s actually in danger. She’s remarkably beautiful, of course. And I can’t recall too many better feral screaming performances in any movie of recent memory than what Weaving delivers here.
Ready or Not is one of those broad satires ready to remind us that the uber-rich are greedy bastards whose very existence is dehumanizing to the rest of us. This idea was maybe a little less played out in 2019 than it is now, when it’s been the theme of a dozen or so high-profile movies since. It’s no more subtle here than any of those other films. But like The Menu, I was at least smiling most of the time.
After the setup, most of the film follows the same rhythm on loop: Grace finds herself tracked down by a Le Domas family member; Grace barely avoids death thanks to a key mistake by said Le Domas; Grace makes some maneuver to survive and escape, but at slightly greater physical harm to herself. This pattern of scenes is sometimes topped off with a little sketch of the Le Domas clan acting outrageously short-sighted and privileged the way only rich people came. And some specific iterations of Grace’s near-survival are more intense than others: there’s a particularly grisly encounter with a nail on a ladder at one point.
It’s… fine. It’s fun! You can see why it got Radio Silence the Scream gig — it flows with a steady drip of thrills and laughs. But it also feels like there’s a constant war going on underneath the surface for just how trashy, satiric, violent, spooky, and comedic to be at any given moment. And yet it may very well be Radio Silence’s best feature film through 2023 (I haven’t seen Abigail from 2024 yet). The ending is yet another bit of thematic self-sabotage (suggesting that rich people’s greedy impulses are not cruel whims but necessary self-preservation), but it is immensely funny and daring. And the set itself is quite cool: a Gothic mansion that seems to be rotting like curdled milk from the walls outward. I just kept hoping the film would take a leap that it never does.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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One reply on “Ready or Not (2019)”
I do like the finale. It’s at war with any of the agitprop themes, but it’s an awesomely wild swing.
It was a nice treat for wearing out my patience with the rest of it, which has decided that since the family is going to be uncool, the hero can’t be so cool that they become complete non-threats (and then they basically become non-threats anyway). It’s like the oppsite of You’re Next, which still isn’t the world’s most amazing movie.