The first shot in Ready or Not, the new comic-slasher film from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, introduces the film for exactly what it is. The shot is a long zoom out over artwork for a board game called “Le Bail’s Gambit”—a phrase which is treated almost as the title of the film itself (and, given later events, would be a wholly accurate title if this were the case). The film is about a game, but it is a game itself—an exercise, an assemblage of images we’ve already seen before, thrown together as if part of a gamble to try to fashion something new.
We know the gambit. A bunch of people are locked in a mansion together. There is a dead body and some baroque-looking woodwork. And at least one person is a murderer. This entertainment formula often manifests as detective stories, though it can sometimes give us horror, but it almost always gives us a mystery. But if the typical variety we get is the “whodunit?” then Ready or Not, is its rare reciprocal, its unlikely response: “whodidnt?”; in Ready or Not, rather than a motley band of folks banding together to solve a murder that has taken place in their contained space, they band together to commit one.
But if the typical variety we get is the “whodunit?” then Ready or Not, is its rare reciprocal, its unlikely response: “whodidnt?”The story follows a young woman named Grace (the excellent Samara Weaving) who is about to marry her boyfriend Alex (Mark O’Brien). Grace has no family, but Alex has a pack—the grim Le Domas clan, who have amassed a fortune manufacturing board games. The wedding is at their estate, and at midnight, the bride and the groom are summoned to a taxidermy-filled secret room for a mandatory family tradition: the newcomer must draw a card, picking a game for the family to play together. Grace gets “Hide and Seek” and is told to go hide. But unbeknownst to her, when she’s found, she will be taken away to be sacrificed to appease the family’s mysterious benefactor, a demonic entity known as Mr. Le Bail whom their great-grandfather once bet his family’s souls to, in exchange for success. If the family is not able to kill Grace before dawn, or if they refuse to play, they’ll be violating their contract and will have to be punished, instead.
Alex hasn’t told Grace what’ll happen if she draws the Hide and Seek card (there are others that don’t require sacrificing anyone), lest she have the good sense to leave him. During Alex’s later, desperate attempt to whisper the actual rules to her, they witness a maid get shot (Alex’s coked-up sister mistakes the servant for the target), and finally, Grace gets the picture. First, she’s in shock, then she mobilizes, tearing the hem off her wedding dress and strapping ammunition to her chest. But she’s not on a mission to kill everyone—she’s on a mission to get out of the house alive. Plot-wise, it’s what might have resulted if the Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game” had a baby with the movie Clue.
The film offers some nuance in its representation of the relative acceptance of this evil ritual by the gathered relatives. Alex’s aunt Helene (whose own new-husband was sacrificed, the last time this happened in the 80s) is a gung-ho lunatic. Others, like Alex’s father Tony (Henry Czerny) and sister-in-law Charity (Elyse Levesque), are fine doing whatever is required to stay wealthy. Alex’s mother Becky (Andie MacDowell) will do what she needs to protect her family from being smitten by an angry demon. But Alex’s generation is clearly broken—his sister Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) is addicted to stimulants, and his cynical brother Daniel (Adam Brody, slinging sarcastic comic relief), is an alcoholic. For his part, Alex, traumatized and disgusted, has been estranged and only comes back for the wedding, because the family rules dictate that he must. Other relatives, like Alex’s brother-in-law Fitch (Kristian Brunn) have no idea what they’re doing, having to watch how-to videos to even know how to hold a crossbow correctly.
It’s true—nothing gets at the sheer evilness and detachment of the powerful and wealthy quite like a pastime of “people-hunting.” And Ready or Not is nothing if not a piercing indictment of the affluent. “The rich really are different,” mutters Daniel contemptuously about his relatives. “F—ing rich people,” pants the battered Grace as she toils through this ludicrous night. But Ready or Not specifically wants to talk about “old money.” The film is full of signifiers of longstanding wealth—the setting in an ivy-covered stone mansion, the colonialist portraits of their great-grandfather hunting tigers, the Southern-belle-style twang in Becky’s voice. We know these people. We know what they’re about.
Tackling “old money” as a concept allows the film to move beyond being a morality fable about greed or basic anti-capitalist analysis into, more directly, a takedown of a white, patrician, wealthy, and historically-male system of power. This movie zeroes in on “the patriarchy” itself, in its most powerful form: as it dovetails with all other areas of perceived social superiority. This powerful family is hiding a dark secret, and the film wryly acknowledges how families of this ilk are afforded “cover-ups,” or are able to violently kill people without worrying about being caught. If one family comes to mind while watching the film, it might very well be the Sacklers.
The Le Domas family game night, with its violent “tradition” and “ceremony,” feels like a fraternity hazing ritual from hell (in which the abjection of outsiders is a rite linked to exclusive power). And, for the family, it is only through the ascendancy of chosen sons that these traditions can be carried on; the family keeps insisting to the scarred Alex that he is going to come back into the fold, becoming the head of the Le Domas household, and Mr. Le Bail’s chief spiritual scion.
The loudest megaphone for the family’s warped ideology is Aunt Helene, who, widowed during the last round of Hide and Seek, is herself the greatest victim of it. This offers a sad reflection on powerful women in enveloping patriarchies who are too brainwashed or avaricious themselves, to help lift them. And, in a hilarious spin on the time-honored notion that the younger generations within powerful families receive privilege they have definitely not earned, most of the young Le Domas adults are too incompetent or dumb to play this game well—turning to hysterics, also, when things become hard.
But most scathing about the film’s “old-money” condemnation is precisely the “family” dynamic; in an era in which the children of our corrupt president only add to, and benefit from, the dishonesty and brutality of our current political reality, the film is extremely clear that these injustices survive because guardians have been born and bred to uphold them. The film is clearest about the tragedy of children becoming indoctrinated into institutions of tyranny and violence. When Alex explains to his mom why he hates his family, he tells her that he has had to unlearn his family culture. He is haunted by the realization that: “you’ll do pretty much anything if your family says it’s okay.” Including, he points out, ritually sacrificing goats. And humans.
Grace has spent her life looking for a family, and prior to her terrible night, thinks she has finally found one. That Grace lacks pedigree (she’s a former foster kid) and is marrying a sort-of American prince adds a “fairy-tale” element which in turn reinforces the Medieval-ness of the whole system—that Grace is effectively transacted to this familial institution, unknowingly forfeiting her autonomy. If this isn’t the film’s clearest argument, I don’t know what else is—after all, Grace spends the entire film in a wedding dress, identified to us as “a bride,” which signifies, historically, being both “female” and being “property.”
Ready or Not is partially about deconstructing marriage as an insistence that an individual (a woman) only becomes a whole person through the attachment to others. Aunt Helene has physically lost a husband, but she replaces him with a consuming devotion to another man: the Mephistophelean Mr. Le Bail. While Grace is running away to try to save herself, she finds herself running back down the very aisle she had walked up, hours earlier during her ceremony. Later, she’ll yank her wedding ring off. Numerous times, she’ll rip her wedding dress apart.
The film is about Grace’s literal liberation from becoming a human sacrifice, but it’s also about her social liberation, away from the idea that a Prince Charming will fulfill her.The film is about Grace’s literal liberation from becoming a human sacrifice, but it’s also about her social liberation, away from the idea that a Prince Charming will fulfill her. If she has been an eternal child looking for a family, or a young woman looking for a husband (“you wanted to get married,” Alex comments unhelpfully, at one point), she is now an adult discovering that she can be her own family. (Visually, she does reach a kind of womanhood, given that, hello, her virginally-white wedding dress turns blood-red by the end).
Thematically, the movie is two-pronged: it’s just as much the story of Grace’s discovery of her total selfhood as it is the story of the battle for Alex’s soul. Its gambit is that a man and a woman are each given different sides of the patriarchy to try to resist. Its mystery is if they will win. I rooted equally for them both to prevail. Grace articulates the film’s sad thesis statement when she learns how the game works: “there’s no way for me to win.” She is right. Her statement resonates so clearly with the experience of being a woman attempting to fight for basic (well, bodily) rights in a world built for the pleasures and conveniences of men.
But, amid all its knowing and depressing undercurrents, the film is triumphant about female strength, resourcefulness, cunning, and resilience. When shocked that the night has dragged on so long, Tony cries out in astonishment, “she’s a little blonde twig!” The film has him deliberately miss the point. Grace’s ideal-girliness: her beauty, her blondeness, her youth, her demure name, her white dress, her wifedom all don’t matter. Nothing matters, except that she is a person. Grace knows what she deserves. And, despite how awful it is that she has to deal with any of this at all, it feels great to watch her fight.
