Ready or Not
Everyone has played hide and seek, it’s just something you do. But what if you had to play the game for your life? And if you got caught, you died. Throw in a wedding and a quirky murderous family and that’s the premise of the recent black comedy/horror film: Ready or Not (2019).
This is a gimmicky premise at its core, there’s no denying it. Gimmicky movies can go down one of two paths: either it’s a messy cash grab with little artistic worth or it manages to entertain you for an hour or so, and that’s about it. There’s a limiting factor when base you movie around a some cultural element that everyone knows about; these kinds of movies are tied down by their need to keep the audience engaged with their familiar premise.
You know UBER, Emojis and Angry Birds? What if they made a movie about them? Even the live action Disney remakes fall into this category, they are of course based on a marketing scheme to manipulate the audience’s nostalgia. The limiting element is that the premise almost always comes from a marketing brainstorm rather than an actual creative spark. There are some exceptions that manage to be truly inspired movies, like The Lego Movie (2014). But those are few and far between and should be treated at lucky outliers.
Ready or Not is not one of those outliers, instead it lies in the second category as a thoroughly entertaining movie that comes close but ultimately doesn’t transcend its gimmicky premise. The Canadian production, starring Samara Weaving as Grace, starts with her getting married into the fabulously wealthy Le Domas family. Her new husband, Alex Le Domas is estranged from his family though he chooses to come back for the wedding. The family, who made their fortune in the game industry, has an initiation ritual where a new family member must pick a card from a box. The card Grace draws is the cursed one: hide and seek.
The ritual demands the Le Domas family must find and kill her before sunrise. The family, each member of which is uniquely zany and could easily swap out with the Adam’s family, arms themselves and go looking for Grace. But Alex has no intention of letting the family ritual claim the life of his new bride. We watch as Grace hides and fights her way through the night. The film works best when cracking jokes at the Le Domas family’s expense and when it explores their dynamics and backstory.
At a tight 95 minutes, the movie barely overstays it’s welcome and it largely aware of its ridiculous premise and rises to the occasion, producing equally ridiculous situations to challenge its hero with. The film does a good job of maintaining the tension and keeping the audience guessing at what will happen next, though sometimes it gets a little contrived. And the pacing does slump a little near the end of the second act because of little contrivances but never to a point that disengages completely.
The best parts were the moments of spellbinding intensity that keep you on the edge of your seat biting your fingernails. The film does a good job of living up to being a black comedy/horror, its biggest asset is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and has fun with the character deaths. One such moment of horror elicited a full-on laugh from me and proved that something in the movie was more than worth my time.
However, this was all surface level entertainment and the movie lacks any real meat. There are quiet moments of character development (mostly with Alex and not our lead) that hinted at an interesting thematic story. Some of these moments felt a little off and they never built to any greater point. The issue with Alex’s character development is that it highlights Grace’s lack of character development. Her character begins as a happy newlywed and ends as a bad-ass woman, mostly surface level stuff. If there was more character growth on her part the movie would have the chance to truly break out of its gimmick. Alas, she spends all her time in various situations that only test her ability to escape and not her character, there are hints of development, but they are too few and they distract more than they improve.
The movie begins and ends with it’s hide and seek premise and doesn’t amount to much else. The characters and situations are nothing truly inspired but it was a lot of fun, and that’s all it really had to be. If you’re looking for a tension filled black comedy you could do a lot worse than Ready or Not.