Ready or Not
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet
Starring: Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brian, Henry Czerny, and Andie MacDowell
Easily the purest, most urgent, and most stupidly one-sided antagonisms in “civilized” history has been the timeless struggle between rich and poor. The latter expending their lives desperately trying to crawl their way out the abyss of impoverished suffering whilst the former gleefully accumulate more and more atop the hellish pit all while making sure to kick as many strained fingers off the ledge as they can. But every once and a while a poor sap manages to make it to the top; they struck gold with an idea, won the lottery, or became a celebrity success story (Oprah or Beyonce). Or they married into a wealthy family.
Ready or Not sees such outcome as Grace (Samara Weaving), who’s said to be an orphan or a former foster kid, joins the wealthy Le Domas family by marriage to their estranged son Alex (Mark O’Brian). Like any despicably rich brood, the Le Domas enforce their own form of gatekeeping in accepting new members to the family. Each prospective addition to the successful gaming dynasty must draw a card from a mysterious wooden box. Printed on the card is a game, picked at random, that the new in-law must play to officially consummate the marriage. Most of the game options are harmless (checkers, some other arbitrary board game), but one proves fatal: hide-or-seek, where the newly wed husband or wife is hunted by the rest of the family armed with primitive-but-deadly weapons. The hider’s fate if found is clearly not good.
Ready or Not recalls semi-recent genre takes like Adam Wingard’s You’re Next (2011) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), and though those films definitely play better in their respective moments, directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillet do a fine job synthesizing the two essences for a shrewd dialectic on class contempt and justified wrath. I’m not as over-the-moon for the snarky August release as its critical champions, but I can appreciate the aesthetic effort along with the refreshingly low-profile ensemble (not knocking the clearly talented cast) that really sell the figurative horror story.
Samara Weaving is an instant-icon final girl and our surrogate in battle against the monolith elite, whom are un-surprisingly incompetent at containing her. The impotent world we presently live in is not the product of competent leadership. Competent leaders don’t justify the future for present exploitation. Capitalism dictates those who own the most capital, the most wealth must wield the most power, otherwise the whole wonky system would cease to exist, which is mighty convenient for those with lots of money, but maybe not. The existential fatalism of capitalism predicates an insulated power class, safe from the violent repercussions of the violence they unleash n-fold. The thing is though, that violence they’ve insulated themselves from has real consequences no amount of money can save them from, and it’ll be their own damn fault.
7.0/10
Horror Scale: 6.7/10