Ready or Not (2019)

I remember my first viewing of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not very well. We had watched the trailer multiple times leading up to its release. I was so excited to take my wife to watch this; I knew this was right up her alley. Boy, was it.

Samara Weaving is an elven treasure here. Which makes sense, considering who her uncle is. I’ll let you do your own research there. Anyway, Samara plays Grace. A young, attractive spitfire who marries into a family that has endless wealth. On her wedding night, it is the family tradition to play a game chosen at random through an old box. The box prints the one card that makes things interesting. The card in question is “Hide and Seek.”

But it isn’t your normal hide-and-seek. In this version, the family must hunt down and kill the person who marries the family. If they fail, they believe a magical family curse will kill them. No one knows if this curse is real or not. Her new husband does everything he can to try and save her, but the family won’t take no for an answer. If they fail, it’s their entire dynasty at risk.

There have been many iterations of this story over the years, and they all stem from the same source material. Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game has been the basis of many of these kinds of films. The early 90s gave us Jean Claude Van Damme’s Hard Target and Surviving The Game. The Japanese threw their version into the hat with the gloriously well-done Battle Royale. Giving way to the much tamer and continuously praised “Hunger Games.” Even just a few months later, The Hunt was released right before Covid. It was also an excellent telling, but it was forgotten and ignored due to its poor timing of release and its political leanings. I just saw it as a satirical win. It’s a shame its politics ruined a great release.

Ready or Not is full of satire, but it’s so perfect and convincing to me. The film has subtle hints of the darkened black magic mystery behind the family. But we never really know until the glorious conclusion. The ending is one of my favorites in film history. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of shock and awe. Even with repeat viewings, it still gets me. Endings for this kind of film commonly make or break the entire film. This makes it and gives it all it needs to push it to that next level. All the talk of evil magic could have been just a fun fairy tale. Thankfully, it’s all saved for the end to give us a definitive climax in the dark arts.

I can not praise Samara Weaving’s performance enough. Her dialogue works, her performance is stellar, and her scream at the end? That’s the stuff of Scream Queen Legends. It’s incredibly emotion-inducing every time for me. She simultaneously exudes what I imagine being terrified, frustrated, and angry feels like, perfectly. This performance most likely led to her getting the famous cameo death at the beginning of Scream 6—it’s just a shame it was Scream 6.

This is probably one of my favorite thrillers ever. Weaving is too good, and the film itself checks all the boxes for a survival horror. I come back and rewatch this fairly often, and I imagine I will for many more years. Balancing the line between horror, comedy, and satire is tricky; to me, this film perfectly mixes all the elements.

You can find copies of Ready or Not cheaply on Amazon. Both on DVD and Blu-Ray. I feel like this one warrants many repeat viewings. Not only around Halloween but also when you want to watch a solid thriller after watching something like Saltburn. Which was recently added to Netflix, and after viewing it, I went, ” I want to watch Ready or Not.”