I’ve often said that a great actor takes a bad movie and makes it good, or at least ok. The same is true of great directors: they can take a terrible premise, and turn it into something interesting or cool (for a recent example, see the Explorer, Dora). You know what sounds stupid? A deadly game of hide and seek. But in the hands of Radio Silence, you get Ready Or Not, a horror comedy hybrid similar to You’re Next that’s equally funny and scary for everyone.
Ready Or Not is that classic tale as old as time. Grace (Samara Weaving) is about to marry Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien), a rich heir to a board game dominion, as the family calls it. Grace hopes to win over the family, so she agrees to take part in the weird wedding night ritual of playing a game: hide and seek. Grace doesn’t really take the game seriously at first…but the sheer amount of crossbows, guns, and axes being carried around by deadly serious family members, puts Grace on high alert very quickly.
To successfully execute a horror comedy, the tonal balance has to be exactly right, or the movie falls apart. Ready Or Not finds that balance pretty smoothly. The movie is mostly a scary film, grounding itself in Grace’s point of view for most of the running time. Justifiably, she’s FREAKED out by what she witnesses, and is put in a couple truly tense scary situations. Thankfully, unlike dumb scream queens, she makes smart decisions, forcing the Le Domas family to respond in kind. And THAT’s where the comedy kicks in. This family is so filthy rich that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to work for or learn anything. The younger family members are so helpless that they may or may not end up killing more family maids than doing their job, or watching YouTube videos on how to use their crossbows. The adults aren’t much better, trying to turn on security cameras to make their job that much easier because they can’t find a person who isn’t familiar with their house. Samara Weaving has a blast playing Grace, tapping into her animalistic survival instincts as she tries harder and harder to escape. The gutteral screams or cursing she does also makes total sense, and also injects some humor into the movie between scary sequences.
Ready Or Not also provides some decent insight into rich family dynamics, at least in a twisted broad way. The most important thing Ready Or Not wants you to know about rich people is that they’ll justify any activity that keeps them with their money and power. There’s a key scene in the third act where something may or may not come to fruition, and you slowly learn regardless of what that something is, the end decision by the family is going to be vile and heartless. Kids are praised repeatedly for sociopathic behavior. No one questions weird traditions either, because those traditions led to the family being on top of the food chain. Inside of the Le Domas family we see all sorts of type of rich people, but the most compelling are Charity (Elyse Levesque) and Daniel (Adam Brody). Charity is one of the more gung ho family members on these traditions…in part because of her background. Charity came from nothing, and after getting a taste of the good life, she knows what she’ll be missing out on, so she fights twice as hard as other family members to get Grace. Adam Brody’s Daniel is basically her opposite. He’s become so traumatized by the family’s behavior that his motives come into question the entire night. The movie comes alive when Daniel is there, because there’s equal combinations of hope and mistrust that keep the scene perpetually tense.
One of the great things about the horror genre is they can find a way to elevate these dopey premises into serious films. Oculus is probably my favorite, because it involves…wait for it…an effing killer mirror. Deadly Hide and Seek isn’t quite as loopy as a killer mirror, but Ready Or Not achieves the same goal as Oculus: making a great movie out of something stupid. I also want to see Samara and Tree from the Happy Death Day movies to team up and tear this mother down.