While it would be easy to write Ready or Not off as another frivolous horror-comedy (though a film it’s comparable to in many ways, Get Out, certainly was taken seriously by critics and award shows thanks to its more racial underpinning, whereas here it’s a classist one), there is much more to it than that. Sure, it’s an absurdist horror-mystery type in the modern vein of Clue but with more gore, yet it’s also an undeniable statement on the ridiculousness of the rich. And how they come to be rich. In the case of the Le Domas family, their game empire (which began with playing cards, segued into board games and then the buying of sports teams–which still doesn’t include the more viable empire revenue of video games) was rooted in an accord made by their great grandfather, Victor, a merchant seaman who struck a deal with a man named Mr. Le Bail while on a ship en route to America back in the day. Leaving out the more sordid details from Grace (Samara Weaving, a sort of aesthetic mashup of Margot Robbie–she is Australian, after all–and Taylor Swift), the newest addition to their family after marrying the favorite youngest son, Alex (Mark O’Brien), they simply tell her that it’s tradition to play a game with any fresh meat to the brood in order to honor part of the bargain agreed upon by Victor and Mr. Le Bail. Not that, you know, he was (and is) the devil incarnate. Hence, the opening scenes of the movie showcasing some of the Le Domas games with a horned man (case in point, a game called Le Bail’s Gambit with the tag line, “Take a risk, gain the advantage”) as their icon. And oh how they seem to worship at his altar, for the thought of losing all the riches they have acquired is more unbearable to them even than death, as iterated by the wife of Alex’s eldest brother, Daniel (Adam Brody). Charity (Elyse Levesque) has no problem admitting to Daniel how unbothered she was when he first told her about the Le Domas “quirk,” informing him that she’d rather live this existence than the poverty-stricken one she did before. And that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep it. That includes, of course, killing Grace after she draws the dreaded hide and seek card. A card that hasn’t been drawn since Daniel was about seven, and he hid Alex in the closet to protect him when he outed the whereabouts of his Aunt Helene’s (Nicky Guadagni) new husband, a man who foolishly thought a child’s “innocence” would sympathize with his plight and help him get out.
That said, the family, comprised of Alex’s father, Tony (Czerny), mother, Becky (Andie MacDowell, these days being eclipsed by her Pete Davidson-dating daughter, Margaret Qualley), sister, Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), and aforementioned brother, Daniel, along with the latter two’s spouses, are a bit rusty on how to hunt for in-law blood. And, by the way, does the family have no respect for the concept of letting a newlywed couple bang in peace on their wedding night? Clearly not. What’s more, Grace has been given an unfair advantage in that Alex forewarns of what’s to happen and promises to help her get through the night (she has a deadline of until dawn before the family has to give up and surrender to the idea that the devil is coming for them). Horrified and incredulous at what she’s married into, Alex turns it around on her by saying he was backed into a corner about marriage, and that she would have left him had he not proposed. With no time to combat being gaslit, she follows his instructions for hiding, ultimately fleeing to the barn where the son of Emilie catches her. Making the same mistake as the last person who thought a child wasn’t a shithead, she thinks he might help her. Instead, he takes aim at her with a gun, maiming her hand in an instant that will prove highly memorable for one of the more gruesome scenes in the movie.
Increasingly battered and bruised–tore up from the floor up, if you will–Grace is running low on steam. And she can’t believe it when she actually makes it out of the gate (after some self-maiming, mind you). Alas, the only car passing is that of a rich asshole’s–for it’s a rich neighborhood, after all. At her breaking point of frustration and caged animal syndrome, she screams, “Fuckin’ rich people!” No greater, more simple line is delivered in the movie to evince its entire undertone: it is the rich, who have the most, that will give the least. Hoarding it all for themselves like some mutant hybrid of Scrooge McDuck and Charles Foster Kane. To help others would be to “unhelp” themselves.
The topic of the divide between the wealthy and everyone else also comes up earlier during the hunt for Grace. Because, you know, hunting for people is definitely a rich man’s invention. “Rich people really are different,” Daniel half-explains, half-apologizes to Grace as he finds her cornered in a room with a pool table (oh how the family loves their games). She regards him with the same expression of incredulity that is on her face for most of the movie. Yet somewhere within, she was already well-aware of that, contributing to a fair amount of anxiety about marrying Alex in the first place. Her fear of not being accepted as one of them. That she herself never had a family and was relegated to foster care lends an added shade of irony to Ready or Not. For she’s so convinced she wants to be a part of a family, she fails to see all the many downfalls of that phenomenon called “belonging to a tribe.”
Alex, meanwhile, further grapples with whether he can carve out his own identity or if it’s irreversibly rooted in his genetics, explaining at one point to his mother while he’s handcuffed to the bed (not as kinky as it sounds) to prevent him from rescuing Grace, “You’ll do pretty much anything if your family makes you believe it’s okay.” A foreshadowing line indeed. So it is that (literally) poor Grace continues to stab her way through the night in a fiendish attempt to escape being the collateral for a Faustian deal made decades ago that she shouldn’t have anything to do with. Then again, aren’t the lower classes of this world always the sacrificial goat for the rich’s Faustian deals made in order to stay rich (ahem, Amazon rainforest)?
Thus, a “light” horror movie manages to address both the crux of class divide and a contempt for family both blood-related and adopted. And, with a final line as cheeky as the one that ends Some Like It Hot, Grace answers glibly to the authorities when they show up to ask her what happened: “In-laws.”
