Oh, how I love watching a movie get better at being itself through no smarter a process than simply continuing to be itself! It’s a delicious reminder to the rest of us that genius is an illusion, all gestures are identical, and that the swiftest form of progress arises not from thinking but from doing! Einstein was good at engineering and math (and then physics) because he was exposed to those disciplines from a young age! Tiger Woods was receiving golf lessons when he was a fucking baby! There is no such thing as talent, just exposure to the topic at hand! This is the best lesson you can learn in life!

Ready or Not

Have you ever just plopped a big ol’ scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream on top of a filet mignon, poured a garden salad on top of that, powder-coated the whole thing with cinnamon and paprika, placed your newly-created food gargoyle inside of a Halloween pumpkin with Betty White’s face carved on it, and then ate the whole thing while dressed as Hitler and wetly gurgling lines from “Dancing Queen” in between tearful forkfuls of the cold death you’ve condemned yourself to? Of course you haven’t, because that would be weird. Ready or Not, a supernatural horror-comedy/critique of capitalism/analysis of patriarchal family dynamics/action movie/pseudo-but-not-quite entry in the “girls get it done” sub-genre/pseudo-but-not-quite entry in the escape-room sub-genre kind of bites off the same voluminous and incongruous amount of stuff in its choice of cinematic focus. The difference is whereas the Hitler/pumpkin/salad thing is more of a moral and nutritional nosedive from which no amount of therapy will ever return the joystick to your hand, Ready or Not actually gets better at its weird, and ultimately manages to synthesize a pretty damn smart story from its almost sarcastically-chosen ingredients.

Fine, I’ll Explain What the Movie is About

God, having to write this section annoys me. Why does everybody want to know what a movie is about before I write about it? You should come here to bathe in my wit and agree reflexively with all of my opinions, context being completely unnecessary, the movie at hand little more than a diving board on which my fully erect genius takes a few playful bounces before launching itself heavenward and then cannonballing into the waters of my masturbatory and circular writing. You know, a movie review. But, whatever. Here’s the skinny:

Ready or Not is the story of Grace, a young woman recently married into the Le Domas family, an impossibly-rich clan of gaming magnates who exhibit all of dynamics you’d expect (intra-family sniping, endless bitterness, secrets galore, the seeming inability to enjoy the fact that they could probably buy the Sun if they managed to liquidate enough assets) from Movie Rich™ people.* The night of the marriage Grace and the Le Domas family all, as per tradition for initiates into their ranks, play a game chosen at random from a spooky, mysterious card dispenser. The game selected is hide-and-seek, which unlike any other game Grace could have selected turns out to have the slight caveat that the family doesn’t just have to just find her after she goes off and hides somewhere in the mansion but also murder the shit out of her, lest they break the pact their grandfather forged with the Devil to provide the family with their endless wealth – and for once I won’t engage in spoilers and will instead let you the viewer discover what exactly will befall them should they break said pact, because it is delightful and best experienced yourself.

* (This can be contrasted with the rich in real life, who aren’t nearly as interesting – more like bland sociopaths – as Movie Rich™ people but for that reason are actually more dangerous. But movies are about escapism, so we roll with it).

Alright, That Premise Isn’t Terrible. So What Were You Complaining About?

I will grant that is a rad premise. The problem is that at first the movie doesn’t seem to know how to unfold that premise while also accenting the story with all the extra stuff it decided to bring along for the ride. We get attempts at portent (Tony, the family patriarch, basically says “I AM HIDING SOMETHING” when it’s his turn to be introduced in the opening), attempts at sincere family dynamics (Becky, the mama-bear of the family who also married her way in, takes Grace aside and with a bitterness mixed with pride that rings of a veteran recounting the things they had to do to survive the war gives the young bride the scoop on what she should expect from her new milieu, and a few tips on surviving it), attempts by obviously-in-their-thirties writers to connect with the kids by including cringe-worthy attempts at Young People Wit (“I see what you did there” a character says at one point, which is a snappy comeback if you happen to be a YouTube video from 2012).

This is all very troublesome. By all means include lots of shit in your movie (looking at you, Suspiria remake) but make sure that there’s some interplay going on between those dynamics and you’re not just flipping a switch between different ideas more or less at random because you’ve confused voluminous writing with insightful writing (looking at you, literally every movie inspired by a Tarantino movie). Connections between seemingly unrelated topics can jazz the shit out of your script but they need to be, well, connected. And early on in Ready or Not that simply isn’t the case.

But then the sun goes down, and shit gets good.

I don’t know if the best writing happens at night, if the turning of the tension dial made my mind more receptive to the sheer amount of ideas this movie tries to convey through its story, or if they just should’ve turned the crock pot on a little bit earlier, because once the Le Domas family starts to hunt Grace everything just kind of falls into place.

Take the family survey, for example. As I explained above the first attempts to introduce the family are clunky and weird. Too much talking, too many tonal shifts, too much time spent on superfluous information. But then the hide-and-seek card is chosen, a still-oblivious Grace is sent out into the mansion to hide, and the family (including spouses who also married their way in, but were fortunate enough to not draw the murder card during their initiation ritual) choose their weapons. And here’s the thing: the look on each family member’s face as they prepare to hunt and kill someone is literally all you need to know about said family member. Some display nearly sycophantic dedication to the tradition – which in the case of one character is especially heartbreaking because the tradition has been nothing but cruel to her, so her love of it now is like some form of Stockholm Syndrome – some are actually eager for the hunt because of how invested they are in the family, some are too stupidly oblivious to understand how fucking nuts this all is, some are simply reserved to the fact that their family is in cahoots with the literal devil but there’s nothing any of them can do about it, so, fuck, hand me that hunting rifle and let’s get this over with, and so on.

This is perfect. The movie could’ve just fucking started here! Film is a visual medium, and we learn everything we need to know about the characters from their facial expressions in one short scene. Even the commentary, as incongruously-presented as the character dynamics in the opening scene, receives a fresher and leaner treatment here. Notice how it’s Tony, our supposedly unflappable family patriarch, who hands out the weapons, specifically choosing older forms of violence (crossbows, etc.) and insisting that they turn off the estate’s security system under the logic that tradition must be maintained, and the hunt must be carried out as it would’ve been in yesteryear. We have him essentially bullying the family, literally forcing weapons into the hands, and making mostly arbitrary decisions (like the outdated weaponry) because that’s what Men Who Are in Charge do. The commentary is fused into the action of the story so even if you don’t give a fuck about patriarchal family dynamics or tongue-in-cheek portrayals of the very rich and their thinly-masked boorishness it doesn’t matter because the story is chugging along at the same wonderful pace as the sub-text.

Wait, what was that about tongue-in-cheek portrayals of the very rich? That wasn’t gone over in the previous paragraph! I’m glad I asked! Dig this:

The weaponry scene isn’t just a one-off occurrence. As the family breaks into smaller groups and begins the hunt we also get an unfolding of family dynamics that develops perfectly with the developing plot. Daniel, the dry and despondent prodigal son of the family, simply gives up the hunt at one point and sits in a room, drinking. This allows Grace some time to escape, and also leads to a confrontation with Charity, Daniel’s wife who is super-eager to kill the bride, at which point we discover that Charity’s enthusiasm for murder comes from the fact that she married into the Le Domas family from what is implied to be poverty, and she simply takes for granted that upscaling your social standing in life requires you to do some sordid shit, and, well – tough for the people who can’t make it. This is a quick exchange, still grounded in the auspices of the plot (this particular family dynamic/social-commentary allows Grace to escape, after all) and tells us what we need to know about the characters in the most efficient way possible.

And how about watching Tony’s outer façade melt away to reveal what a buffoon he is! It is a pleasure to behold, and I enjoyed seeing it play out on a screen! It turns out that the portent Tony displays in the weaponry scene, while he is still dominating the family, is a reference to his power to do… nothing. Tony is a moron, and as shit goes south for the Le Domas family and Grace simply refuses to die he becomes more pathetic and unhinged. Like so many rich people who inherited their money Tony has no idea what to do when things aren’t just handed to him, so when he decides to cheat and violate his “no modern utilities” rule that decision doesn’t just increase the stakes of the movie (Grace has even less places to hide now that the security cameras are back on) but also perfectly and concurrently carries along the “generational wealth people are literally the worst” theme that the movie has been working on. Of course Tony starts screaming like a sociopathic toddler, drops all pretense of being a serious businessman, and announces his intention to cheat. Did you expect anything less? *

* I did, because I underestimated the movie. Sorry, movie!

So by the time…

So by the time we get to the point in the movie where Becky has taken control of the hunt for Grace – Becky, who married into the family, who has had to survive all sorts of weird shit to maintain her social standing, who is embittered by the things one must do to survive in life but also accepting of them – it makes total sense not just as a plot development but a commentary on how outsiders are stronger than the generational wealth types. This also makes her confrontation with Grace towards the end of the movie more than a little bit depressing because, as Becky herself points out, the two are pretty fucking similar – but there aren’t many seats available for outsiders at the rich-people table, so let’s dance, motherfucker. Christ, what a cleverly-included dynamic! It in no way impedes the leanness of the plot! I mean that sincerely! Is this the same movie we started with?

And by the time we get to the part of the movie where Emilie, the coke-fueled daughter of the family who has been our most consistent source of slapstick humor amidst the fusion of family drama and social commentary and horror thrills, bluntly reveals to her brother Daniel that she will kill no matter what for the family because her two sons also live under the obligations of their collective pact with the Devil this pivot into the heartbreaking responsibilities of a mother is not wildly out of place but thoroughly earned because the movie has been synthesizing its goofy/violent thrills with sincere family dynamics so beautifully for the preceding hour. Emilie has killed multiple people by accident at this point in the movie, has fulfilled her role as the female play on the Large Adult Son to great comedic effect, but even she is fueled by a very real motivation, and is tortured by her feelings of being trapped in this awful family. Suddenly that coke habit is recontextualized, eh? *

And by the time we realize that Grace’s immaculate wedding dress, which eagle-eyed viewers will notice comes replete with a tight collar signifying the Le Domas family’s control over her, has been reduced by the events of the plot into a collection of rags that Grace has retrofitted into various bandages we don’t roll our eyes at another movie attempting a pandering and clunky commentary on the modern woman freeing herself from social expectations but rather appreciate this delightful visual development as another function of efficient storytelling! “Girls get it done!” is kind of buried under the shear breadth of other things the movie wants to talk about but because that slight dash of yet another theme is included mostly as a visual function of both the plot (Grace goes from being annoyed at accidentally ripping her dress in the earlier stages of the plot to reflexively tearing off pieces of it whenever she needs the lace for something else) we’re totally on board with it, even if we don’t realize it. Hang another K on the stadium railing, movie, because you are just cruising along now.

* I’m not sure why I keep acting like you’re the one who jumped the gun on assessing this movie. Projection? No, that’s impossible, I have no flaws.

The End

Ready or Not’s decision to shed the multiple pedestals of its opening scenes and instead just kind of puree everything – the tone, the style, the commentary, the plot – into the story of desperate morons descending into even more desperate moronicity is a stroke of genius. In making this decision the film doesn’t abandon the ideas from its opener but just kind of lets them all blend together and present themselves in whatever form works for any particular scene. Like the old observation that you can’t give yourself a nickname, or that you only become cool by not trying to be cool, when the film just kind of gives up on presenting everything flawlessly it starts to present its ideas efficiently, which is the best kind of storytelling in a medium with a finite timeframe in which to get across whatever you’re trying to get across. That it manages to do all of this while telling the story of a young woman being hunted by exploding demon-rich dickheads on an estate granted by the devil, and also include a scene in which she goes swimming in an ocean of corpses, and a scene in which she punches a child, only endears it to me further. Watch this shit!