Ready Or Not

On her wedding night, a bride learns that her wealthy new in-laws are bound by a demonic pact, and that she is meant to be sacrificed, following a deadly game of hide-and-seek.

With Ready Or Not 2 currently playing in theatres everywhere, and soon to be available streaming, I decided to revisit the first film, so I'll be fresh on the details when I finally see it. After watching, there was one thing I wanted to get out of the way right at the start…

Ready or Not is a horror movie.

But it’s not the kind of horror movie you think it is. I don’t mean that in the bullshit poser way. I’m not saying that Ready Or Not is “elevated” horror, which is a somewhat recently made-up term that is only ever used by dumb nerds who are embarrassed by liking a film in the horror genre. It's similar to the way some dumb comic book nerds might be embarrassed to admit in public that they happen to like a comic book, so they’ll refer to them as “graphic novels.” Doing this apparently somehow makes comic books cooler, more like you’re actually riding a motorcycle while wearing a leather jacket with three supermodels sitting behind you. So, I guess the theory is, if you like "elevated" horror, than you're not some plebeian piece of shit chortling at the sex and violence, you're actually an academic of an unimpeachable taste, and you're wearing a turtleneck under your tweed jacket with the patches on the elbows, all while sipping cognac in an art museum/library.

Try it. Say it out loud. Elevated horror.

So classy, right?

Anyway, when I say that Ready Or Not is not the kind of horror movie that you think it is, I’m saying to non–horror fans that it’s not like whatever it is you think of when you hear that a film is a horror movie. Because most people who say that they don't like horror, when they hear that a film is a horror film, they seem to picture some kind of ugly and vicious and terrifying cinematic experience along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the Shining, or the Exorcist, or Cannibal Holocaust, or whatever horror film they’ve always heard about, and have probably never actually seen, the ones that they’ve heard are the scariest, too scary to watch, because they find the experience of being scared unpleasant, so they turn the idea of liking that experience into a character flaw, and they then lump all of the horror genre together under this umbrella, dismissing it all as gross and scary and gross and ugly and gross and bloody and gross and awful, and as a result, they never actually give any of it a fair chance.

Which is too bad, because they're missing out on some good movies.

Admittedly, this is actually part of where the whole erroneous “elevated” horror label comes from. It’s not just a bunch of posers desperately trying to justify their enjoyment of something that they fear some vaguely defined "others" will consider to be “trashy” by preemptively “elevating” it above the filth of the great unwashed and holding it up as “Art” with a capital A. It’s also a way of convincing the people who claim to hate horror films, even though they never actually watch any of them, to actually watch this one, because “oh no, this one isn’t the usual kind of garbage, this one is good!” And my point is, it’s always nonsense any time someone does it. The Devil’s Backbone? Horror. The Witch? Horror. Raw? Horror. Frankenstein? Horror? Nosferatu? Horror. Sinners? Horror. Midsommar? Horror. Get Out? Straight up mother fucking horror. There’s nothing “elevated“ about any of these films. They’re good movies, yeah, but they’re also just a example of regular horror films. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is full of shit and/or lying.

But to be fair, that is kind of what I’m doing here today...

Although, to be clear, I’m not saying that Ready Or Not isn’t a horror film. What I’m saying is that Ready Or Not isn’t like how you might imagine horror films to be in your head. It’s horror, yes, but if you watch it, you’ll see… it’s also a thriller and an action movie. It’s not bloody and terrifying and gross.

Not at all.

Promise.

So anyway...

Our movie begins in the late 80s. The Le Domas family are very wealthy. They have a board game and playing card empire, and own multiple sporting teams. Their name is probably derived from the French le dommage which means “the damage” or “the harm,” and it’s probably no coincidence that it also sounds like “La Dumbass”

But that’s for later…

For now, young Daniel and Alex Le Domas run, in panic and pajamas, through the great halls of their family mansion. Older Daniel has the frightened younger Alex hide in a cupboard, and immediately afterwards… he's confronted by Charles, a man in a tux, bleeding, pierced with arrows, and begging for help.

Instead, Daniel yells for his family, who arrive in creepy ceremonial masks and dark robes. They’re all armed with crossbows and axes. Despite the pleading of a young bride with a 1980s pixie cut, Charles is shot with a speargun, and dragged into a nearby room. The bride wipes her tears, squares her shoulders, and follows the others into the room.

Daniel watches from the hall as the doors are closed behind them.

Thirty years later…

Alex is now grown, and has been estranged from Le Domas Family, but he has returned home because he is about to marry Grace MacCaullay, a former foster child. Unlike the Alex and his family, Grace is not a blue blood. She’s a regular person who has built a life of her own, the kind of girl who seems more at home wearing ratty yellow converse, than in a house with a music parlor. Still, she and Alex are happy. They just need to get through this one little family tradition–that the wedding and all its related activities need to happen at the family estate–but once that’s done, the rest of their life is their’s, and they can leave his shitty family behind forever.

Now some people out there may call it a bit strange that Grace has literally no one at her wedding, not her foster parents, not some friends, not even a bride’s maid. To those people, I say… Shhhhhh! Shut up. Quiet down!

Watch the movie.

Meanwhile, the Le Domas family is definitely present. Alex’s parents, Tony the patriarch, and the glamorous Becky. Daniel is there too, of course, with his sharp tongue and his drinking problem, along with his covetous shrew of a gold digging wife, Charity. Alex's sister, Emilie, a high-strung brat with self-esteem issues and an over-reliance on cocaine, arrives late, with her doofus bro of a husband, Fitch, and their young sons Georgie and Gabe, whose pale faces and bowl cuts make them nearly impossible to tear apart from the few glances we get. Finally, there’s Alex's Aunt Helene, who, judging by her hard stare, severe face, and short hair, was the pleading bride 30 years ago. There’s also, Stevens, the butler, and three maids who look like extras from Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video.

After the ceremony, Grace and the La Domas family gather in the Game Room. Seated around a large wooden gaming table, Tony then tells the story of how his great-grandfather Victor La Domas, while working on a ship crossing the Atlantic, met a man named Mr. Le Bail. They played cards throughout the trip and towards the end, Mr. Le Bail gave Victor with a puzzle box, promising that if Victor solves it before port, he will finance any venture Victor wishes.

As long as he promises to hold to one condition…

Victor solves the puzzle box and he agrees to Mr. Le Bail’s terms. Now, five generations later, whenever someone joins the family by marriage, on midnight after their wedding, the new member must draw a game card from Mr. Le Bail’s puzzle box, and the family then has to play that game.

Grace draws Hide and Seek.

Believing it to be a harmless game, Grace happily skips off and hides, as the La Domas family secure Alex in the Game Room, and then arm themselves. Stevens locks down the house and, in the spirit of fair play, shuts off the security cameras too. Then the family begins to hunt Grace. But Alex escapes through the mansion’s old servants passageways, finds Grace, and the two hide in their room just in time to watch Emilie shoot and kill one of the maids, whom she mistakes for Grace. So now, Grace understands that this isn't a fun game.

Alex explains to the shocked Grace that his family is cursed.

He goes on to say that, if Grace had pulled the Old Maid card, or the Checkers card, for example, then they would’ve played that game, and there would’ve been no blood, but Grace drew the Hide and Seek card. Now, the family must find her and ritually sacrifice her before dawn, or they will die instead. It’s a rare card. The last time it was drawn, it was by Helene's husband, Charles, thirty years ago, who was then found and sacrificed, after being betrayed by Daniel. He further explains that this curse is also why he brought Grace here, because if they hadn’t had the ceremony here, if they didn’t participate in the ritual, then they’d both be dead by morning in some horrible way, a fate experienced by multiple relatives over the years. He just didn’t think she’d pull that particular card.

But she did. So it's time to get serious.

Determined to get Grace out of the house, they split up. Alex goes to the security room to take the house off lockdown. But Grace is discovered by Daniel, who sees a small chance for redemption and gives her a head start before alerting the others. In the chaos, Emilie accidentally kills another maid, and sobs at the unfairness of the help continually dying because of her actions. Grace almost escapes, but she is blocked by Stevens, who she burns with boiling water before running away. Daniel and Tony restrain Alex after he destroys the security system. A chance encnounter with the third and final maid ends with the young woman accidentally crushing herself in the dumbwaiter after she tries to alert the family to Grace's presence, a fitting bit of karma for her lack of solidarity. Grace finally manages to get outside, slipping past Fitch as he googles: “Pacts with the devil real or bullshit.” In the goat shed, little Georgie finds Grace, and shoots her in the hand, so she knocks the little Hitler Youth out, but in the process, falls into a charnel pit filled with the remains of previous sacrifices, mostly goats, but also the corpse of Charles, still stuck with arrows from 30 years ago.

In end, despite a valiant effort, even managing to slip past the fence that surrounds the family grounds, Grace is captured and returned to the Game Room.

But shit goes poorly for the La Domas family, as some family members redeem themselves at the last, even as other reveal their true colors. In the end, the first rays of the sun touch the horizon, there’s a bit of blood and fire, and Le Bail briefly reveals himself to Grace, the night's sole survivor, giving her a nod for a game well played. Sitting on the stone steps outside as the police arrive, the mansion merrily burning behind her, Grace lights a smoke, and when asked what has happened, she simply replies: "In-laws."

The Poor Man’s Margot Robbie, and a Scream Queen extraordinaire, Samara Weaving is awesome. A likable hero with great comedic timing, a "hot girl next door" rough and tumble believability, as well as a charmingly sarcastic twist to her smile, not to mention an incredible pair of blue eyes, she is often the best part of a bad movie, and sometimes the best part in terrible movies. Here, she gets to be the best part of a good movie.

Because Ready Or Not is a good time at the movies.

A spin on the classic short story by Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game (or The Hounds of Zaroff), published in 1924, about a big-game hunter who falls from a yacht and washes up on a seemingly uninhabited island in the Caribbean, only to be hunted by a Russian aristocrat, a kind of twist on the idea of big-game safaris, Ready Or Not is funny and sharp and gory and moves quickly. It's a simple premise executed with very little fat, or any needless mucking about, and all done by a great cast. It's a little underlit at times, sure, and it's not going to reinvent the wheel or anything, or change the social zeitgeist at all, but still... it's a fun time.

But that having been said, I really do love the film's very clear metaphor.

In August of 2019, when Ready Or Not was released, America was a shithole.

It wasn't as much of a shithole as it is now, of course. Trump was still somewhat restrained by the "adults" in the room, those oh-so-noble bigot white Republicans, the ones who preferred dog whistle racism to trumpeting it from the rooftops, like they do now. COVID had not yet taken over the world at that point either. Yes, in the time since, Trump, his administration, and Elon Musk, all with the willing help of the majority of white Americans who voted Trump three times, have killed and harmed so many people, hundreds of thousands and counting, through their white supremacist agenda, and all while stealing billions too, irrevocably wrecking not just the social fabric, but the institutions, and any kind of hopeful future for the country in the process. Meanwhile, COVID has killed (as of April 3rd, 2026) over 7.1 million people–a number that continues to climb, despite what so many selfish (mostly white) Americans would rather believe–and it continues to either kill, or maim the infected, due to the still being discovered debilitating effects of Long Covid. But at the time, back in 2019, none of this had happened yet.

Not yet.

So, yeah, while it was pretty bad back in 2019 (and honestly always had been in this country, depending on how insulated you were from it by your own privilege) we weren't living with a constant deluge of reminders of just how bigoted, entitled, greedy, and ugly white America's ruling class of assholes truly were, or how eager the majority of white Americans were to make sure that those rulers remained in power, even if it was at their own expense.

So... at the time, still constrained by their masks of civil society, white America's preferred method of excercising its privilege was to play the victim. In basketball, this is called a "flop." Whether they were being persecuted for "speaking common sense" or for "sharing an opinion," those tears were on tap. Which made sense, as it was an especially dark time for the small business owners, trad wives, and all the dudes in wraparound shades sitting in their pickups. And who could blame them? I mean, one time, a transwoman posted a picture of her and a Bud Light. Another time, the Green M&M was de-sexified. Black people were allowed to have jobs, and to even hold opinions. Latino people were allowed to work and live here. There had been a Black President... twice! Meanwhile, a bunch of innocent, salt of the earth, blue collar, white people were being unfairly filmed in public simply for asserting their God-given authority over minorities, the stress of which resulted in them accidentally speaking multiple racisms! These were terrible crimes against God's chosen, the people made by his hand (as clearly shown in the movie The Bible: In the Beginning... by John Huston), the only true human beings in this country, the only ones who get to be known as "Americans" without some kind of qualifier beforehand, like "Asian" or "Native" or "Not actual" or whatever. These crimes needed to be addressed, or they risked being forced to suffer the effects forever, like when they allowed The Gays to steal the rainbow...

And so it was, on August 10th of 2019, Universal Pictures decided to cancel the release of the movie The Hunt. Originally slated for September of that year, the film was shelved, citing an abundance of respect for the victims of whatever the most recent mass shootings were, tragedies that there was nothing we could do to stop, despite being the only country on Earth where they happened regularly.

But the reality was that The Hunt had been the victim of a sustained right-wing flop. The film's impending release had been become the Panic Du Jour on the bigot media channels, the center of a multi-week storm drummed up by the usual bigots, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Matt Gaetz, blah, blah, blah, reaching all the way up to the Godhead Pedo-King of White America himself, Donald Trump. They all claimed, without having seen the film (a Most Dangerous Game variation where rich people hunt poor people for sport), that the message of the film was it's okay for liberals to hunt conservatives with guns. This was such obvious ridiculous nonsense it was like they were speaking gibberish, but Trump, or one of his people, were most likely being credibly accused once again of being rapists and pedophiles and sex traffickers at the time, so... time to get out the pitchforks and tiki torches. The "tempest in a teacup" status of their freakout was proven nine months later, when The Hunt was released with little fanfare, and turned out to be nothing but the usual tepid "both sides" bullshit from white Centrists.

Meanwhile, Ready Or Not (a Most Dangerous Game variation where rich people hunt poor people for sport), did not get subjected to the same freakout, despite the fact that it was released in the same month that Universal decided to cancel the release of The Hunt.

Now, some people will try to claim that Ready Or Not didn't get the same treatment because it wasn't trying to be such an obvious "message" movie, unlike The Hunt. But you can only think that is true if A. you've never actually seen either movie, and/or B. you're stupid. The reality is, Ready or Not didn't get treated the same as the Hunt, because it was all fake. It was all made up. The people who got upset–those white Republicans and MAGAs, and the white centrists who support and enable them–don't give a shit. Not about The Hunt. Not about any of it. They don't have any princples at all, not beyond hate and greed and entitlement, so their bible is just a weapon to club people with, and everything is excusable if they do it, so public flops like this are just performative and baseless and reactionary, nothing but capricious, arbitrary, and self-serving tantrums. They did it because they're monsters, because they don't actually believe in anything at all, nothing except they're all that matters.

“And then I realized that you’ll do pretty much anything if your family says it’s okay.”

Like I said, the film's got a pretty clear metaphor.

And that's what makes Ready Or Not so good in a metatextual sense. The La Domas family is a microcosm of the ills of society, and this is a film all about the blood that greases the wheels of their machine, about the bodies they burn to fuel their world, how they'll lie to you, and disregard you, and cast you aside for their own enrichment. And I loved how, in this film, this is clearly presented as the very definition of evil. It is a literal pact with the devil. Mr. Le Bail is an anagram of the demon Belial, a name used in the Old Testament for the Devil, so there's no wiggle room there. And the best part is how, in the end, due to their stupidity at making this pact, due to their greed and their low character, their selfishness, in the end, it was the all La Domas family's fault. They were the ones who were the instruments of their own destruction. It was due to their own actions that everything they had built, their entire world, it was all cast down in fiery ruin. They signed that deal of their own free will, they made a choice, and with little to no concern for those they hurt along the way, they enjoyed the benefits of that choice, and in the end... the Devil got his due. So it was a pleasure watching them get destroyed. 

Like I said, Le Domas sounds like Le Dumbass.

The only question I was left to ponder was... Was Grace just unlucky to be there? Did she only survive due to luck? Or was she actually a tool of Mr. Le Bail? Was she unknowingly sent there to clean up a deal that he had grown tired of? Was she the Devil’s chosen weapon of destruction? Is that why Alex and she met? Was that the work of the Devil? Is that why Alex, as a child, was the only one to ever see Mr. Le Bail in his chair? Was it a signal that he was to be the family's downfall, and not, as his father believed, to be its future? I don't know, but I like pondering the question. Maybe they'll expand on this more in Part 2?

Either way... this is a great movie. Lots of fun.