Written by Hayley Hunt
The thought of running and hiding for one’s life is not an appealing notion. Games, however, of running and hiding are simply something to entertain children and their friends when parents are busy working. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett added these two concepts together to create the bloody horror movie Ready Or Not, a movie where one’s life depends on the game being played.
After the movie being released Aug 21, 2019 by studio Fox Searchlight Pictures, it got a rating an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 7.3/10 on IMDb, Ready Or Not has made an entrance into the world of horror movies, sprinkled with comedy.
The outline of the movie is that the bride Grace, played by Samara Weaving, marries into the famous Le Domas family, who has made their fortune off of making games. This family makes whoever joins into the family play a game at midnight that lasts till dawn, but the game is one pulled out of a box, thus making it randomized. Grace pulled out the card that says hide and seek on it, which causes her to laugh at the notion of hiding till dawn in the large mansion while the rest of the family members attempt to find her.
The plot twist is that the family members are actually trying to kill Grace before the sun rises or else the remaining members will die in a frightening and horrible way. Daniel Le Domas, played by Adam Brody, is Grace’s husband, who attempts to help her sneak out of the house and escape in order to keep her alive.
Ready Or Not has a good balance of both gore and comedy in order to give the audience a break. The comedy itself mostly comes from crude language and the character Fitch Bradley, played by Kristian Bruun, along with the character Emilie, played by Melanie Scrofano. These two characters are husband and wife, where Bradley had married into the Le Domas family, but he does not actually wish to participate in the game of hide and seek. Emilie, on the other hand, wishes to make her parents proud by being the one to kill Grace; however, she is continuously taking drugs throughout the movie, thus only adding to her hyper and childish personality even more.
Throughout the entire movie, multiple workers and family members get killed during the game. For the most part the Le Domas’ get too overwhelmed or excited at the prospect of killing Grace that they accidentally end up shooting and killing people without looking at who they are. This results in both a comedic factor, as well as added gore.
While the comedy is a nice added bonus, some of the ways they go about it comes off as cheesy and not very well thought out. Many of the characters’ conversations that are used to lighten the mood simply involve them looking exasperated at another family member and then saying a sling of curse words. This does prove to lighten the mood, but also makes the characters seem not as sophisticated as before, considering they are a famous, rich family that uses smarts and, (the audience finds out later), a pact with the devil, to get their good fortune.
Aside from the not-too-thought-out comedy lines, this movie does cover many of the normal horror movie tropes, included masked members, murder, ghosts, gore, pacts with the devil, weapons, and a fighting protagonist. All of these movie aspects continue to reel people into the theaters, which resulted in Ready Or Not earning just over $8 million during the opening weekend, along with all of the positive reviews from both critics and audience members alike. As for my rating of the movie, I would personally give it an 8/10; however, the only way for you to know if you like it is to go and see it for yourself.
