The new horror-comedy “Ready or Not” manages to offer an inexplicably pleasant experience considering its plot and genre. A young woman’s wedding night is interrupted by the family tradition of her well-monied groom. Each new member of the Le Domas family, famed for their centuries-long dynasty built on board games, must choose a game and play on their wedding night. Tradition demands. So, a bemused but game Grace agrees. Picked at random, her card demands she play a game of hide-and-seek. Fine. Except, it’s not so fine. Little does she know this game is actually hide-and-kill, and before dawn the family plans to find her and kill her. Tradition demands.
That’s the short of it. “Ready or Not” accomplishes what it sets out by making things incredibly easy for our audience. Writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy are riffing on some familiar tropes: the final girl, the horror comedy, rich people as remote and bizarre, the deal with the devil and what’s most significant about “Ready or Not” is that it deliberately plays into tropes to turn everything on screen into a game, rather than real life. “Ready or Not” does not need to invoke reality, so much as slyly nod to it in passing. So, the characters –most of them rich and soulless – are not so much people as they are types. We meet the exuberant, probably high, sister; the sarcastic drunken brother; the steely but charming mother; the acidic aunt and so on. And amidst all these types, there is Samara Weaving as Grace – in over-her-head and increasingly knowledgeable as the film goes on. There’s no character in the film to root for or even care for beyond her, and it’s a flaw as much as it is a value of the film. With little concern about the rest of the cast, “Ready or Not” depends not so much on suspense – it telegraphs its ending early on – so much as it depends on seeing how the inevitable will unfold.
The sheen of non-reality is explicit. “Ready or Not” is shot by DP Brett Jutkiewicz in a way that’s immediately visually incongruous. Most of the film covers the hours from midnight to dawn, and the muddiness of the shots, augmenting a yellowishness that borders on sickliness, makes sense for the perversity on screen. Everything looks like it’s being refracted through some slightly off dreamscape. Except the dreamscape is a hellscape and Grace is living it. Except, hell isn’t chilling and sincere but pathetic, and ridiculous but still deadly. The film’s greatest stylistic choice is placing Grace, who spends much of the runtime alone, in a film that’s fairly harrowing and tense as she tries to work through the horrific realisation of her potential fate and placing the rest of the family in a perverse sort of comedic non-reality, that’s not quite satirical but riffing on the myopia of the very rich. Weaving is an excellent lead. She benefits from having the closest thing to a round character in the film (even if she still has startlingly little agency or depth) and who we easily root for. The perverse portion of the film, though, is slightly more enjoyable, especially with standouts Melanie Scrofano and Adam Brody playing variations on hilariously inept and bitingly sarcastic, respectively, to good effects.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have a sensibility for mining dramatic tension and humour from things that seem like observational minutiae, which is when the film works best. There are so many keen throwaway moments. The film is slightly more leaden footed when it comes to the literalness of its theme. The brief prologue feels unnecessary, for example. By the end of the film, Grace has been pierced in both hands and her abdomen scarred and dripping with blood. She’s even placed on a wheel akin to a cross to hit-home the Jesus metaphor, which turns the careless silliness of the film slightly off-kilter. It’s the main reason I can’t quite read any serious class critique into “Ready or Not,” which seems to be just using the seeming eccentricities of the rich as a fun trope rather than saying anything incisive about class or society. It doesn’t really need to, though.
“Ready or Not” is fun and diverting enough to feel like a good kicker to the end of an underwhelming international summer-movie-season. There’s an “accidental” death mid-way through the film that made me laugh in such dry surprise. And that’s the kind of macabre content that works about the film. The ending is a bit less assured, with the attempts to explain its mythology that feel effortful. But it doesn’t weigh down what works about the film. “Ready or Not” is a game. Fleeting and silly, but fun and even exciting at times. Not a bad way to spend 100 minutes.
“Ready or Not” is currently playing at local theatres.
