Ready Or Not Movie Review

“Hey, you wanted to get married.” - Alex Le Domas

Ready Or Not is a horror/dark comedy/suspense thriller starring Samara Weaving, Mark O’Brien, and Adam Brody.  The film is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and tells the story of Grace, a young woman who on her wedding night, gets suckered into playing a deadly game of hide and seek with her in laws.  

I’ll start this review by saying that before this movie, I hadn’t heard of Samara Weaving.  Only very recently did I learn that she is the niece of the incredible Hugo Weaving, which is really no surprise considering she, too, is great at acting.  She totally shines here as Grace.  The rest of the cast is also quite good at playing the roles they were given.  Another standout in this film is Adam Brody as the totally apathetic and sarcastic Daniel Le Domas.  I loved Daniel, and thought he was a great character.  The way Brody delivers his lines with an incredibly dark and deadpan style is hysterical.  He had some lines in this film that were amazing, and really had me laughing.  Henry Czerny is also fantastic here as Tony, the patriarch of the Le Domas family.  The way he just lets loose with outbursts of swearing and screaming whenever things don’t go his way is really funny, and great to see.

It seems like lately, films are portraying the rich, upper-class, one percent as villains in movies, which is very interesting to me.  This film does exactly that, and it works like a charm.  You get to see a great amount of why lots of general average citizens have a hatred for people like this, and while lots of it is played for comedy, it still manages to tackle this particular aspect of the social divide very well.  

The use of lighting in this movie is particularly impressive.  I loved the way each scene had an orangish sort of glow to it, and thought that it really added to the mood and the tone of the film.  The camerawork is nice to look at, and the use of classical music was really great.  The set pieces were very well crafted, and had an old-fashioned, rustic architecture that I really appreciated.

The main problem that I have with the film is that I found some moments to be very predictable.  Part of this lies in the marketing.  The trailers gave away far too much, and I didn’t like that.  I recognize that this isn’t the fault of the film itself, but it still bugged me quite a bit.  However, on the other side of this, there were also a handful of moments that I never saw coming, particularly the awesome ending scene, which gave me some serious The Cabin In The Woods vibes.

In the end, I really dug Ready Or Not, and if you like gory, darkly funny horror movies with a twist, I feel like you probably will dig it too.

Rating: R

Grade: B+