Ready or Not

Grace has just got married and she realises it wasn't a good idea. Her new in-laws want to play hide-and-seek with her. If they don't find her by morning, she wins. If they find her, she'll probably die in a cruel ritual. It'll be fun. Ready or Not is a blackly humorous horror film that alternates fairly brutal scenes with a lot of gritty humour, but also some solidly suspenseful moments. It has a great main character, and the only problem in the end is that they didn't step it up a notch. As a whole, though, it's pretty good. (08/27/2019)

A decent, inventive slasher, which turns an ordinary family dinner into something you won’t forget easily. Moreover with the lead role of the bride played by the fair Samara Weaving, who has witchcraft, fear and mysteriousness already in her name. Even though nothing that happens in the film is actually her fault. (02/28/2020)

When two people do the same thing, the results of their efforts will differ depending on their respective levels of talent and life experience. Thus, while Ready or Not would like to be another Get Out, as the promotional materials emphatically make clear, it can never have that film’s sting. The grievances of one ethnic group and the phantasmagorical delusions of the privileged social class are not revealed here. Rather, only a group of well-to-do people make fun of rich people within the limits of the genre. Thanks to that, Ready or Not works great as arelief valve for the frustrated workers of our capitalist reality, but it characteristically does not open up its subject in any way or contain any overlap into everyday reality. Above all, however, it does not open anyone’s eyes. It’s just an amusing episodic film in which, instead of the monstrosity in the human heart or the gears of the predatory system, we can only see our own need to simply find festive relief in a properly explicit lynching. (01/05/2020)

Ready or Not is an entertaining and easy-going mischievous comedy with a relatively interesting cast (Andie MacDowell playing a role unconventional for her), a relatively fast-paced plot, and a pretty healthy amount of ghoulish entertainment. Do not expect to be terrified, it is really just a sort of action movie loaded with black humor. (09/19/2019)

Jordan Peele's open arms for horror social satire might suggest that the genre is being given some relevance again after the era of stupid ghost flicks, but that would be to forget that combing social ills in extreme hyperbole was already in the job description of the Purge tetralogy. And that was a load of crap. Ready or Not isn't that bad, and there's definitely a bigger head behind it, as revealed by some witty dialogue (for me, the argument about how tradition is important, but when you're leaking in your shoes, you start to consider that after all, its author would also have used contemporary technology if it had been available to him at the time) or the hilariously bestial ending. But the problem is that the whole thing is terribly unbelievable – the characters of the rich are simple caricatures without a shred of respect, the violence doesn't hurt, the fire doesn't burn, the vulgarities ring false, you don't trust the actors to take a drag from a cigarette, and the violence is the kind of cool domestic hurt where blood spurts, brains stick to walls, and wounds open, but in that safe movie way where it's actually kind of funny. Luckily, Samara Weaving is a wild one who gets it all right, and her clucking at the end will probably be the only thing I'll remember from the film a year from now. (11/25/2019)