‘Ready Or Not’ Wants To Play A Game

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, two-thirds of the filmmaking collective Radio Silence, were given a raw deal with their feature film debut Devil’s Due. Radio Silence was responsible for some of the more memorable segments of the anthologies V/H/S and Southbound, but Devil’s Due suffered hard from a mediocre script. Well, Bettinelli and Gillett have bounced back with a vengeance. Their newest movie (with fellow Radio Silencer Chad Villella serving as executive producer), Ready or Not, is a blast.

Ready or Not is about a young woman named Grace (Mayhem’s Samara Weaving) who, after growing up poor in foster homes, marries into a wealthy family. Immediately after the wedding, her new husband, Alex (Mark O’Brien from Bad Times at the El Royale), brings her to a strange ceremony with the rest of her new family. Grace is told that it is a family tradition that she picks a card, and everyone will play whatever game is named on the card.

Sounds simple enough, but things get dark when Grace pulls a card that says “Hide and Seek.” She is told to hide for the night and avoid detection until morning. What she isn’t told, or at least not immediately, is that the rest of the family will be hunting her down and trying to kill her. Some of the family, like matriarch Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni from Cube and Crash) and mother-in-law Becky (Groundhog Day’s Andie MacDowell) are ruthless in their pursuits, but others, like brother-in-law Daniel (Adam Brody from Scream 4), seem like allies. Grace has to stay hidden until morning to survive the game.

The screenplay for Ready or Not was penned by short film writer R. Christopher Murphy (The Mill at Calder’s End) and television scribe Guy Busick (“Stan Against Evil,” “Watch Over Me”). It’s a slick and clever marriage (see what I did there?) between The Most Dangerous Game and You’re Next, pitting a young and able newcomer against a group of fearsome (if sometime less-than-competent) killers. Sure, hunting the underdog is a story that we’ve all seen before, but Murphy and Busick provide enough unique twists and takes to keep it fresh. This allows Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett to lean into the tongue-in-cheek camp of the scenario and make a really fun movie.

There’s an interesting tonal shift that happens in Ready or Not, and it happens almost before the movie itself begins. The expected Battle Royale­-esque violent sport tale immediately gives way to a more surreal, fantastical story of cunning and survival, sort of like a darkened version of Clue. Throughout the course of her high-stakes night, Grace encounters the different family members and their servants (all with different antique weapons), and while her panicked instinct is to fight, not all of them are entirely hostile towards her. And she’s a good person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, so she’s tasked with figuring out who she can and cannot trust, all within the blink of an eye. And Ready or Not is at its strongest when she’s wrong.

In some ways, Ready or Not is exactly the movie it pretends to be, and in others, it’s completely different. The plot and character arcs are always shifting and developing, so the viewer never quite knows what to expect. And that’s the idea. Ready or Not is an unpredictable game that makes an even more unpredictable movie.