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'Ready or Not' Is a Delightfully Insane Thriller with a Great Sense of Humor

No spoilers!

By Jonathan SimPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
2

Well, because of this movie, I am never marrying anyone rich. After all, I'm a film critic. I don't need someone with money when I make dozens of dollars a month.

Here We Go!

Ready or Not is a black comedy horror film written by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.

This movie stars Margot Ro—I mean, Samara Weaving as Grace, a young bride who marries into a rich family. They have a tradition where they play a game on the night of the wedding, and this turns into a deadly game of hide and seek, where the family begins to hunt her down in their mansion.

I've seen some great new releases this year, and I didn't know what to expect from this movie, but I actually loved this movie. This was a great film that I had a ton of fun watching.

One of my favorite aspects of this film is that it's a very contained horror thriller. The movie takes place entirely in one location, which is a giant mansion with a lot of hiding places and items, and I think the setting was used pretty well throughout the film.

Another strong aspect of this movie is Samara Weaving, who gives a great performance. She is charismatic and funny in a lot of her scenes, but she is also fantastic in the scenes where she's shrieking in pain. Weaving nailed comedy, drama, and horror in this movie, and I loved her performance.

Everyone in this movie gives a great performance, and they all do a great job of selling the scenario that we're given because the premise of this movie is crazy, but the actors pulled it off really well and managed to make it entertaining, exciting, scary, and funny.

The comedy is also something I want to talk about because this movie is a very dark comedy as well as being a horror film, and I think it worked pretty well.

Instead of being a more generic horror film, this movie had a sense of humor, and a lot of the comedy came from the quirks of these family members, since some of them don't have a lot of experience killing people, and this creates some good comedy as well.

I liked how the family members were given a bit of development and personality in order to keep them interesting and not make them into one-dimensional killers. They were interesting and they would shift their loyalties from good to bad, and that made them unpredictable.

The horror sequences are also directed pretty well. Several of the shots are handheld, and I think this helped to create an uneasy feeling that kind of put the audience in the shoes of our protagonist, who's fighting to survive this situation.

But I think the biggest issue with this movie is that Grace, our main protagonist, isn't given a lot of development. We don't get to learn that much about her or her backstory because so much of this movie's focus is on the family instead of her.

Essentially, she felt like a one-dimensional hero who doesn't really have a character arc or a good amount of development. She's just a very simple protagonist who could have been a lot more interesting if her backstory had been given more time.

And I feel like the way the characters in the family would shift allegiances from wanting to kill Grace to not wanting to was done a bit clumsily, and we could have learned a bit more about why each of them make the certain choices that they make throughout the film.

The movie also opens with the family killing someone, and in the scene, they're wearing masks. However, they no longer wear masks when they're trying to kill Grace, and I think the film would have been scarier if they had been wearing masks for a lot of the movie.

My last two complaints are that the second act can feel a bit repetitive and there's a dream sequence that I thought was really unnecessary and should have been left on the cutting room floor.

But aside from that, I thought this movie was really great. It's got a lot of dark humor, but there are also a lot of sequences that are pretty suspenseful and scary as Grace needs to get out of a lot of situations throughout the film as she tries to survive.

I'm not gonna spoil the last two scenes of this movie, but they're simply perfect. The ending of this movie is incredible and unexpected, and I thought it was a really interesting original idea.

Overall, this is a horror movie with a lot of great suspense, a good amount of gore, some really dark humor, and it's a movie that I liked mostly because of the black comedy elements and the very contained environment.

I'm gonna give 'Ready or Not' a 9/10 (A-).

Do I recommend this movie? If you like horror thrillers and/or black comedies, I recommend it. If you're not a fan of these genres, I don't, but I had some good fun with it.

Thank you so much for reading.

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About the Creator

Jonathan Sim

Film critic. Lover of Pixar, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Back to the Future, and Lord of the Rings.

For business inquiries: [email protected]

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