A no-frill slasher commences on the wedding day of Grace (Weaving) and Alex Le Domas (O'Brien) and ends roundly the next morning, she is an orphaned girl who marries into the affluent Le Domas family, which has been flourishing on the business of making board games for three generations, but with a proviso. Every non-blood-related new member of the family must pass a weird nuptial ritual, choosing an initiation game, in the succinct prologue, we glimpse a killing of a bridegroom , and Grace unfortunately draws the same “hide and seek” card, and becomes the prey of her reluctantly armed in-law family.
Inverting the tired final girl template, horror filmmaker duo Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett (their sophomoric feature) takes its cue from Jordan Peele's GET OUT (2017), pits our heroine against the ragtag team of a self-serving rich household, formulating the similar tropes of a victim's ordeal and her intrepid fighting back (where body horror is predictably strewn along the way), and throws equivocal monkey wrenches in the works to further thicken the plot like Alex and his bibulous elder brother Daniel (a sympathetic Brody), which one will be the savior of Grace?
More successfully deployed is the wacky tone that is against the grain of the default somber and grisly timbre, the persecutors are not cynical, morbid sickos but gormless Wasp ne'er-do-wells, who are set out to kill only to save their own skin, thus introduces risible characters like the drug-popping, lethally accident-prone Emilie Le Domas (Scrofano), and her cheekily skeptical, shiftless husband Fitch (Brunn), who can languidly take his time to google “how to use a crossbow” amidst the hair-raising hunting game.
Cunningly playing with the pact-with-the-devil curse, READY OR NOT manages to keep our hearts dangling until the final reveal, and rounds the story out neatly in a gratifying fashion in the veins of a southern gothic horror with a difference, satirizing plutocratic hypocrisy, callousness and acquisitiveness.
Among the kaleidoscopic, Canadian-heavy ensemble, Samara Weaving is the new Aussie Margot Robbie wannabe, who brilliantly defines the central “a worm will turn” transmogrification; O'Brien, also sedulously forges his way through the treacherous characterization of an in-the -know husband who selfishly conceals the truth from his oblivious wife, and has the most complex inner trajectory to tread. Also Andie MacDowell shapes up a Janus-faced presence as the matriarch who can call the shots when her husband Tony (Czerny) is on the verge of losing his marbles.
Efficiently reconciling spontaneous laughter with gory subject matter, READY OR NOT is executed with efficacy, style and some unexpected flair, an above-average genre fare that might surprisingly win over many nay-sayers.
referential entries: Jordan Peele's GET OUT (2017, 7.3/10); Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL: VOL. 1 (2003, 8.6/10) and VOL. 2 (2004, 8.1/10).
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