Ready or Not

Those walk­ing into Matt Bet­tinel­li-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not hop­ing for a cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of The Del­fon­ics’ 1968 clas­sic ​‘Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide from Love)’ might be dis­ap­point­ed. Oth­ers may be pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by this gory and mean stalk ​‘n’ slash hor­ror com­e­dy, set entire­ly in a man­sion full of secret cor­ri­dors and dead­ly house­hold items.

The set­ting alone already tells us that the film, like many oth­er man­sion-set hor­ror movies before it (Clue and House on Haunt­ed Hill come to mind), will indulge in at least some degree of class cri­tique. Espe­cial­ly when said house is gloomy, dark and creaky, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, its walls cov­ered in por­traits of deceased fam­i­ly mem­bers. This con­cern with remem­ber­ing and even pre­serv­ing the past jumps out at Grace (Sama­ra Weav­ing), vis­it­ing for the first time the fam­i­ly home of her soon-to-be hus­band Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien).

Rather more brash and sar­don­ic than most hor­ror hero­ines, Grace isn’t rich and does not fit in the world of the Le Domas fam­i­ly – one of man­ners, polite­ness, and bare­ly con­cealed van­i­ty. Refresh­ing­ly, how­ev­er, the film blurs its good vs evil dynam­ic a lit­tle: in the same way that Grace, though dressed in white, isn’t an inno­cent or naïve damsel, the fam­i­ly mem­bers reunit­ed for the wed­ding do not exact­ly hide their unchecked neu­roses or vile per­son­al­i­ties. It isn’t impos­si­ble to imag­ine them all get­ting along the way most fam­i­lies do.

Instead, the film trans­lates this inher­ent class dif­fer­ence between Grace and her in-laws into a more lit­er­al and unavoid­able con­fronta­tion, in the form of a dead­ly game of hide-and-seek. The Le Domas fam­i­ly, which made its for­tune from board games, bets its con­tin­ued suc­cess on its faith­ful­ness to a ludi­crous tra­di­tion: every new mem­ber must ran­dom­ly pick a game to play, and though not all of them involve mur­der, their ver­sion of hide-and-seek does.

As Grace, secret­ly helped by Alex, escapes her hunters as best she can, the film opts for strate­gies more log­i­cal and real­is­tic than sur­pris­ing­ly inge­nious. Noth­ing Grace does strikes you as par­tic­u­lar­ly imag­i­na­tive, which feels a lit­tle odd and even some­what dis­ap­point­ing when con­sid­er­ing the wit of the dia­logue. But this allows for a more vis­cer­al expe­ri­ence that glee­ful­ly and repeat­ed­ly delves into gore.

Grace does not grace­ful­ly escape from her hunters at all. Rather, she is put through the wringer, engag­ing in hand-to-hand com­bat, falling from heights, is stabbed and much more. This dark tone does not feel sadis­tic thanks to Weaving’s pow­er­ful, no-holds-barred inter­pre­ta­tion, play­ing Grace as a woman simul­ta­ne­ous­ly bewil­dered, ter­ri­fied and des­per­ate to stay alive. It also helps that, sim­ply put and with­out spoil­ing the fun, the Le Domas’s have it much worse.

The film is a great show­case for all of its actors, though some char­ac­ters are more straight­for­ward clichés than the oth­ers. Adam Brody once again plays on his boy-next-door image with delight­ful results, as he so won­der­ful­ly did in Jennifer’s Body, while Andie Mac­Dow­ell shines in a rare vil­lain­ous role.

Weav­ing, mean­while, com­mands the atten­tion and is our life­line across a film whose dark and not always inven­tive humour often threat­ens to become rather exhaust­ing. Indeed, one may long for the more slow-burn thrills of human hunt­ing clas­sic The Most Dan­ger­ous Game or the stealth exe­cu­tion skills of Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Tar­get. But some­where in between these two films, the thrilling mix of dark sar­casm and body hor­ror of Ready or Not still satisfies.