Directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Starring: Samara Weaving, Mark O’Brien, Adam Brody, Andie MacDowell
Rated R, 95 minutes
What makes a good satire? Is it, as in last year’s “Sorry to Bother You,” the exaggeration of an unjust reality to its absurd conclusion? Or the opposite, the portrayal of that reality as the most mundane version of itself, such as in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic “Dr. Strangelove”? Or is it enough to just cage your enemies and exact your twisted revenge? “Ready or Not,” the new black comedy horror-thriller, takes this last approach, shocking us in that way that only lowest common denominators can shock us.
Taking place on the family estate of a board game tycoon, the movie follows an unsuspecting bride, Grace (Samara Weaving, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”), on her wedding night. Grace has married into the fabulously wealthy Le Domas family, with which her husband, Alex (Mark O’Brien, “Arrival”), has a difficult black-sheep history. Wanting to mend the bridges he’s burned, Alex has brought his bride home to partake in the family’s long-held wedding traditions. Chief among these traditions is a wedding night game, selected at random by the bride. Unfortunately for Grace, she selects the wrong game: Hide and Seek. In the Le Domas family, Hide and Seek is played as a hunt, and Grace discovers the hard way that she’s the prey. One moment she’s having a heart-to-heart with her new mother-in-law, Becky (Andie MacDowell, “Groundhog Day”), and the next, Becky is taking up bow and arrow and shooting to kill.
The ensuing chaos as Grace fights for her life isn’t revolutionary in its plotting, relying more on set pieces and props (the teapot used as a club; the dumbwaiter that becomes a guillotine) than characters or story, but the movie generates consistent spectacle just from watching Grace get out of one jam after another. And in the movie’s few moments dedicated to subplots, the gore is somehow even more lurid. One character takes a crossbow shot to the face before being beheaded by the family’s great-aunt, and that’s just for comic relief. Yes, this is a gruesome movie, one that shows off its violence the way a child might show off a souvenir at show and tell.
The pandemonium is executed well, but “Ready or Not” is all too willing to sacrifice other qualities in the pursuit of new and inventive ways to draw blood. When the bride rightfully asks why her groom didn’t warn her about this tradition, he says, “If I had told you, you would have left me.” We are supposed to feel sorry for him. The result of lazy scenes like this, of this dedication to gore at the expense of coherent storytelling, is a movie that is gratuitous, entirely gratuitous, a movie with bad acting and worse writing and no taste—yet, which is so revolting that you cannot help but watch.
It’s easy to think of all this unbridled bloodshed, these millionaires wielding antique weapons against the woman they see as an interloper, as a comment on the often inhumane treatment of the poor by the wealthy. And this criticism becomes clearer as the movie continues, not just because of the sympathy we have for Grace, but also because she isn’t the Le Domas family’s only victim: the maids and the butler get involved, too, and always as the family’s expendables, as pawns in a larger game rigged against them. “I liked her,” two separate men in the family say over a dead maid, before moving on. But this heartlessness, however viciously portrayed, is the extent of the movie’s commentary. There is nothing, ultimately, to be learned from “Ready or Not,” no purpose beyond its premise.
Still, the movie’s blind fury feels connected to the populist rage of this moment in time, feeding our worst impulses and asking us, when it cares to ask us anything, where we found such an appetite. One thinks of the French revolutionaries in the late 1700s who beheaded a woman, put her head on a pike, and then hoisted it up to Marie Antoinette’s window to taunt her; how violence begins as an elaborate comedy, a joke that seems ridiculous until it becomes terrifying. “Ready or Not” doesn’t reveal anything new about this truism, only that it remains as ugly as ever.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/6/19.