Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
Quick Impressions:
Last night my husband and I arrived at the theater at 7:00 and soon found ourselves asking in confusion, “Where’d Where’d You Go, Bernadette go?” My sister was in town last week when the movie opened on Thursday, but I reassured myself that waiting a single week would not be a big deal. Despite hearing less than great things about the film, I love Cate Blanchett and still wanted to see a movie where she talks all the time and destroys Kristen Wiig’s house with a giant mudslide. That sounds fun, right? (So what if it has weird pacing! Doesn’t every Richard Linklater film have weird pacing?) But just one week after the film opened, the 7:15 showing of Where’d You Go, Bernadette was gone.
Since we were already at the theater losing a game of hide-and-seek with our showtime, we decided to see Ready or Not, a delightful, exclusive peek at a wedding in a wealthy family of board game enthusiasts who have an undisclosed tradition of hunting new brides to the death.
I won’t lie. I wanted to see that movie anyway because its trailer is fun. (In fact, if I’m being honest, the trailer makes it look better than Where’d You Go, Bernadette.) Plus its relentless ad campaign has been infiltrating all my electronic devices for the entire month of August. (Pretty soon the microwave will be recommending it!)
Murder always spices up a game of hide-and-seek, and the cast intrigued me, too. I liked Samara Weaving as Penelope (the equine therapist/guileless girlfriend of Frances McDormand’s ex-husband) in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, so I was curious to see her in a leading role. Also, the trailer made it look like Andie MacDowell is in the movie, and she is. I hadn’t seen her in a while, so that was a welcome development. If MacDowell is trying to make a big screen comeback, she’s chosen an excellent project. This film is like the missing link in a triple feature with Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day.
If you like horror, hate weddings, or have ever fantasized about death when an uncomfortable game of hide-and-seek drags on forever then Ready or Not should highly appeal to you. Hide-and-seek is big lately. Have you noticed? The professional YouTubers my daughter watches all seem to play every few weeks. The film should also speak to fans of the escape room craze. And it will probably crack you up if your family is in an evil cult of some sort. (You can roll your eyes and laugh to yourself, “What?! That’s not how we do it!”) You’ll probably be fan, too, if you’re the type who browses bridal magazines as a hobby, but you frequently find yourself complaining, “These are all too sanitized! I wish they would show more gore!” Ready or Not obligingly gives us scene after scene of Samara Weaving running around in wide-eyed urgency wearing a gorgeous wedding dress and looking increasingly like John McClane in the first Die Hard. If you don’t like that, then why are you going to the movies in 2019 at all?
The Good:
The story is pretty fun. Originally, I toyed with the notion of skipping Ready or Not because the trailer looked great but seemed to show a two-minute version of the entire movie. What surprises could possibly be left? But Ready or Not does have a few tricks up its sleeves. And I think it probably does help the audience to know what kind of story to expect going in. If by some miracle you haven’t seen the trailer or any ads for this film, don’t worry. As the movie opens, we quickly see another bride being hunted through a darkened house by a family wielding deadly weapons. So Ready or Not isn’t trying to surprise us with these horrors. Instead, it wants to delight the audience with dramatic irony as Samara Weaving’s character slowly discovers what she’s in for. This isn’t a case of a movie’s plot being spoiled by the trailer. (What Lies Beneath would have done so much better with a less revealing trailer!)
As I watched the early scenes (before Samara Weaving realizes she’s being hunted), I noticed, “This has a very pleasant, storybook quality to it.” Lots of movies are adapted from books (Where’d You Go, Bernadette, for instance), but this movie feels like you are experiencing one. The beginning feels like a story I could be reading with my ten-year-old daughter (except there’s more profanity). We spend a lot of time alone with the bride to ensure that she’s the character in whom we become emotionally invested. Honestly, everyone else feels like set dressing, the trappings of a wedding. And then we follow the bride into the darkness of this spooky old house, complete with creepy family.
As the story unfolds, there are some surprises. I wouldn’t call them plot twists exactly. More like graduated revealing of the truth. (You know how sometimes people slowly break bad news to ease you into it?) If you’re any good at anagrams, the name on all those board games in the opening credits should clue you in to what’s going on. The bride, of course, doesn’t know what’s happening. But how much does the family know? That’s one of the mysteries we’re trying to solve. Are they to some degree unwitting victims, too? Do we know more about them than they know about themselves? As the film goes on, we slowly see more and more and more information to help us answer these questions. I actually like the way Ready or Not teases out just how much the family knows and how much they’re willing to reveal. We don’t get complete confirmation of what we suspect until they very end.
In some ways, this story is simple, slick, superficial. It’s impossible not to understand the plot, and most elements of story aren’t open to interpretation. But there are some metaphorical ways to read Ready or Not, too. Pretty obviously, the film takes great delight in exposing to us the horrific behavior of the very, very rich. All rich families have skeletons in their closets, right? This family keeps their skeletons in a pretty nasty (and quite revealing) place! Conspicuous accumulation of wealth usually means those doing the accumulating have inconspicuously caused the impoverishment of others. Greed results in suffering. Wealth protects wealth. As far as the wealthy are concerned, poverty diminishes personhood. And being poor keeps you poor. (The scenes in the car with Justin (voiced by Nat Faxon who plays Pickle on Blaze and the Monster Machines) really illustrate this last point). Ready or Not can easily be read as a scathing indictment on the mega-rich and on our society which privileges them (yet also hates them).
It’s also a pretty good cautionary tale about marriage and what happens when the honeymoon is over and you slowly learn the truth about your new spouse and his family.
I think Ready or Not also has a lot to say about desperation, how people reveal their true selves under pressure, how friction will wear away a pleasant veneer. And what we are most desperate to keep reveals the truth of who we are.
There’s probably a spiritual reading to all of the crazy events, too. I mean, the bride’s name is Grace, and when you get a look at what’s going on in the barn, and it’s sort of hard to think this isn’t some kind of unhinged allegory.
But you don’t really have to think too hard when watching Ready or Not. Mostly you just watch the bride run around in her increasingly bedraggled wedding dress trying to escape from the pack of less and less civil in-laws desperate to kill her. That’s pretty good entertainment. Certainly, no one can complain of boredom. The stakes are life and death (possibly even higher) at every second of the film’s brief ninety-five minute runtime.
The story is compelling enough, and the cast is certainly watchable. Samara Weaving will no doubt continue her climb to stardom since she’s very solid as Grace. This is crucial because if we didn’t like Grace and want to look at her running away and fighting for her life all the time, the movie wouldn’t work at all. Andie MacDowell is quite good as the mother-in-law who welcomes you with open arms, until she has to kill you. For me, the standout in the cast is Adam Brody as the bride’s hard-drinking brother-in-law, although most of the laughs are provided by his sister Emilie, a drug addict who is great at killing (just not the right people) played by Melanie Scrofano. Emilie’s husband Fitch (Kristian Bruun) is also very funny (and a dead-ringer for Glenn Shadix’s Otto from Beetlejuice). I also enjoyed Henry Czerny (whom I last saw playing Alan in Sharp Objects) as the family’s increasingly pressed patriarch. Memorable, too, is Nicky Guadagni as the hilariously creepy Aunt Helene. Mark O’Brien and Elyse Levesque are just fine as groom Alex and his ironically hard-hearted sister-in-law Charity, and John Ralston really shines as Stevens, the dedicated servant undone by his excessive love of highbrow music and hot tea.
Best Scene:
My favorite part in the entire movie comes when Fitch is stealthily watching something on his phone and fails to notice something behind him. Is this truly the film’s best scene? I don’t know. I can’t defend this choice. I just know that it was my favorite part in the entire movie. I laughed loudly and enthusiastically. I felt excited. And the action I saw on screen viscerally thrilled me.
Best Joke:
Emilie’s whiny lament following one of her mistakes is pretty hilarious and certainly drives home the reading of the film as a satire lampooning the one percent.
Best Scene Visually:
Sometimes this film is on the lazy side visually. I had the nagging feeling that instead of coming up with expensive sets or inventive shots, the movie decided to rely on the image of Samara Weaving in a wedding dress. Weaving is striking in the dress. And she’s always running around in it everywhere. That’s what we look at. The rest is kind of no-frills (particularly for a story about excessive wealth), but Weaving is quite captivating in the dress. She has enormous eyes that telegraph her current intense emotion, and the dress (though always lovely) becomes increasingly tattered and blood spattered as the film progresses.
Some things look cool–the angle from which we see one character handcuffed to a bed, the flight into terrain of a different elevation, a character peering into a stairwell from above. But sometimes the camera just seems to be moving around haphazardly.
A couple of scenes have some visual heft, though. The encounter with the maid in the dumbwaiter gives us a visual illustration of a point made by either the social satire or the religious allegory. Take your pick. Either way, it’s a teachable moment.
Also good is the moment the entire family looks at a phone, watching, yelling, so far removed from the action.
Best Action Sequence:
The various encounters with John Ralston’s Stevens provide all of the best action in the movie. The bit with Andie McDowell and the box certainly makes an impression, though.
The Negatives:
Both my husband and I found the ending of the movie disappointing. It’s not horrible. But it could have been much better. He preferred the elegance of the false ending that occurs just before a pregnant pause. I wanted something much darker. Mid-film we get perhaps the only truly shocking revelation of the movie. This new information teases a possibility that leads to what seems to me an obvious “twist.” (My husband did not necessarily view that twist as inevitable the way I did.) But I wanted the movie to go farther, leading to the darkest ending possible. I’m not sure that my ending would have tested well with audiences, but I think it would have been more interesting. Possibly, though, I’ve just been watching too many Ari Aster movies.
If you don’t want to be disappointed by the ending of the movie, just quit watching ten minutes before it’s over and imagine your own conclusion. Surely you can come up with something at least as good as what the film actually does.
But the more I think about it, Ready or Not seems destined to be cursed with an inadequate ending. I mean, that’s the nature of hide-and-seek. While you’re hiding (getting more and more uncomfortable), you think, “This is epic! They’ll never find me! When they finally discover me here, their minds will be blown! We’ll be talking about this for years!” But after the game ends, do you ever sit around gushing about how epic the hiding place was for longer than two minutes? Hide-and-seek is about the experience of hiding and seeking. Any ending to the game is a bit of a let down.
Now, my husband and I did spend the entire drive home talking about what went wrong with the ending, and also teasing out the finer points of what the ending means. Certainly, then, the ending provokes conversation. I can’t decide if this is a point in favor of the film or against it since I think certain elements of the story could be clearer. (In light of the events of the ending, my husband and I could not seem to agree on what it meant that the bride agreed to play a game and draw a card.)
Occasionally I found the movie less clever than it wanted to be, and sometimes the visuals seemed uninspired, but these are pretty small complaints.
Aside from the ending, the only other thing I didn’t like about the movie was all the gore. But that’s probably a selling point for some people. Prepare to see ripping flesh and…You know, maybe there are some more memorable visuals in the film, after all, and I just didn’t enjoy seeing them. That bit in the barn is just too gory and cringey for my personal tastes, but I must allow that it sticks with you. And what specifically happens to Grace may be bound up in some religious allegory should you choose to interpret the film in that way.
Overall:
Ready or Not was not the film I intended to see, but it was solidly entertaining with a coherent message and lots and lots of captivating shots of Samara Weaving John McClaning for her life in an increasingly tattered and bloodied wedding dress. If you like horror, you should enjoy this end-of-summer diversion. Even if you’re not a horror fan, you might like some of the subtext of this feature length game of high stakes hide-and-seek. I’m sure my older kids will like it, but my mother probably won’t.
