Ready or Not

Release Date: August 21, 2019
Runtime: 95 minutes
Rating: R
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
Cast: Samara Weaving; Adam Brody; Mark O’Brien; Henry Czerny; Andie MacDowell; Melanie Scrofano; Kristian Bruun; Nicky Guadagni; Elyse Levesque; John Ralston

A very bloody but not-so-very thinly disguised piece of social commentary wherein family-less (read: poor) Grace (Samara Weaving) must endure a particularly twisted version of Hide and Seek with the outrageously rich family of her fiancé, Alex (Mark O’Brien). It’s as if the Brothers Grimm had somehow joined forces with Agatha Christie!

Australian Samara Weaving is one of those naturally unaffected actresses who are a joy to watch, and she effortlessly carries Ready or Not during its compact 95-minute running time. Moreover, what I admired about the film is its tight construction: no person or situation is wasted. For example, after the quick but informative prologue, the movie proper gets underway as Grace and Alex arrive at his ancestral home for their spectacular backyard wedding. We don’t meet any of Grace’s family (she has been raised in foster homes) or friends because the story doesn’t require that we do. This movie is all about efficiency: shaving off what is not needed in order to provide the most direct path from beginning to end. Because of this, there is room for the film to have some fun along the way with some of the characters (like the perpetually nerve-jangled Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) or the delightfully morbid Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni) who looks like she must have wandered over from the set of the latest Addams Family movie). My only complaint is that the movie didn’t go further in its nastiness. Some characters develop a conscience part of the way through and it screeches the movie to a halt. I realize that the filmmakers are working for Fox Searchlight and were producing a mainstream horror-comedy, so I guess full throttle repugnancy was never an option. But it would have been nice (and truer to the characters) if the filmmakers had carried the odious undercurrent all the way through.

As it stands, however, Ready or Not is a mostly successful and certainly entertaining horror-comedy; an almost shamelessly macabre addition to the summer movie season.