Ready or Not (2019) sits in this very specific sweet spot where you realize about fifteen minutes in, that the movie is not interested in being just one thing and that is both the rarest quality in genre and the thing most studios are too scared to actually commit to, after watching Ready or Not 2 I decided to throw it back and watch the first one too, because pulling off a genuine hybrid where you are laughing out loud and then immediately covering your mouth because something horrible just happened requires everybody on screen to be completely locked in on the same target, just look at the scene I put on the blog post cover, you saw the multiple body explosions at the end right?. We got Grace, played by Samara Weaving, is marrying into the Le Domas family on the same night she discovers that this clan of board game millionaires has a blood ritual tradition that requires new members to draw a random card and play whatever game it says at midnight, and the card she pulls is the one card in the deck that means the entire family has to hunt her down and kill her before sunrise or some ancient deal with a guy named Mr Le Bail comes due in the most catastrophic way possible for all of them. She spends her wedding night running through a massive stone mansion in a ripped dress while her new relatives come after her armed with crossbows and axes and rifles, right from the starts when things start to get menacing you start to get that sense of fear and danger for poor Grace who had no idea what she was getting into, these are not competent satanists, these are wealthy idiots who are terrified of losing their money and their lives, who at the same time are very very incompetent at murder.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7798634/
- Platform: Disney+
[Source](https://www.disneyplus.com/browse/entity-b5393a64-e0af-4199-9888-69b93907d8b3)
Samara Weaving is the one who carries the movie the entire time and it was by design, if you have not been paying attention to her career before this then Ready or Not is the kind of performance that makes you immediately go back and check what else she has been in, because she carries every single scene on her back without it ever looking like she is working hard to do it. Her dark humor performance is perfect without ever undercutting the actual fear she is selling at the same time, how she basically transform across ninety minutes from a hopeful bride who just wants to be part of a family into a bloodied and furious survivor who is completely done trying to avoid rather to confront and choose violence as her last resource, not because the script hands her some big action hero moment to announce the shift but because she earns it incrementally you can feel it. The supporting cast around her is doing great work too, especially Andie MacDowell who is quietly threatening as the mother in a way that sneaks up that you expect it the least, and then there is the uncle who at one point hides in a bathroom watching a YouTube tutorial on how to load a crossbow because he has never actually used one before, which is the perfect piece of detail because it makes the whole murder family feel like real people who are mostly just rich and scared and out of their territory almost like they just have to be this way without any previous expirience.
The movie goes hard on the carnage and thats a great thing when its not the best part of it because the performance and drama is very high too, and there is a very specific type of dark comedy that works great with those gory moments but I have to be honest here, this is obvious that this movie is not for everyone, because the deaths are graphic and drawn out in ways that are simultaneously horrifying and absurd and the movie holds both of those at once without letting either one collapse. The pacing is also doing real work here because at ninety minutes this thing is tight and never feels like it is getting over stretch to just fill time gaps, there is no bloated second part where you start checking your watch or wanting to hit the fast forward button, every sequence has its own weight and keeping your attention exactly where the movie needs it, and that kind of discipline is something a lot of horror comedies just do not have or when they attempt to just fail at it, because they assume the concept alone is enough to carry them through. The production quality on the mansion location is impressive too, the whole place is lit with this mix of candlelight and deep shadow that gives it the right atmosphere without feeling like a haunted house movie or going full dark room that you are force to watch the thing on 4k because its just too dark, it does feel like a very expensive trap that was built specifically for someone wearing a white dress on her weeding night.
Where the movie does leave a little on the table is in the action department, because the poster and the marketing give you very specific images of Grace in full savage mode and the actual movie is more interested in keeping her in a reactive and dark humor like survival mode for most part of the movie, which works fine but does make you feel the gap between what you expected and what you actually got when you think about it afterward. There are some scenes that are very cliche too and if you are watching movies constantly you can tell this are been advertise from very long distance so its too predictable in some occasions, certain surprises a little too clearly for anyone paying close attention to the details, and while that is not a problem it does take off from the experience in a couple of moments when the movie probably could have trusted you to be a little more patient because I think they do this kind of things to dumb it down and rush it too at the same time and crunch more content into the movie. It felt rushed towards the end like the script and actors were running out of gas, the classic until dawn survival situation, but the cast still made it watchable because even in the sequences where the script is being a little too obvious about where things are heading, the people on screen are making choices that are interesting enough to keep you in it.
Compared to other genre movies playing the same dark comedy horror angle in that era, Ready or Not (2019) does something that most of them fail to do which is actually justify its entire setup from the start all the way through to the finish line without losing the thread because during the movie there are moments where it stops to take a small breath and even provides you context that doesnt make you feel disoriented, at the same time when the movies does this it doesnt feel like its trying to get too clever for its own good, and at the end everything tries to come together and it delivers in a way that is completely absurd and completely satisfying at the same time. Grace smoking a cigarette on the front steps covered in other people is one of those final images that you will still remember clearly at the end of the year because it earns everything it is asking you to feel right there in that moment, and not many movies with this kind of silly concept can actually pull that off, there is something about her laughing as the balance change on her favor feels so damn satisfying. This is a solid 8/10 for me and this is kinda bad for the sequel to be honest because then for those who watch them in order as usual feels like the sequel sux, it is the kind of movie that delivers on a genuinely crazy idea without ever getting too smug about how clever it thinks it is, and Samara Weaving has earn her bars either people see it or not because this performance absolutely demands that kind of recognition, totally recommend it.
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