Ready or Not

It's difficult to not immediately compare Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not to Adam Wingard's 2011 stunner You're Next. Both films feature an Australian actress (both veterans of the never-ending seaside soap opera Home and Away) racing around a massive mansion pursued by murderous in-laws armed with crossbows. In her Wingard directed showcase, Sharni Vinson had to cope with shrieking subordinates and an ever-changing landscape of intergenerational loyalties. Samara Weaving's Grace is less encumbered, obliged to slink around an unfamiliar household while still wearing the remains of her wedding dress. Where Vinson got to tap into an expertise for mangling (one that no film since has expected of the actress), Weaving instead runs an emotional gamut, scrunching up her makeup model good looks as she forces her shredded gown though a succession of shocks and snares. Of the two, Ready or Not proves to be the lighter proposition. Its characters are caricatured and confused rather than sexually deviant trust fund children who climb all over each other while their mother rots inches from their rut. As well, and despite a large cast of bumbling oafs, Ready or Not does not adopt the tick 'em off structure that so electrified You're Next either. Grace's initiations into the pacts that underline the fortunes of her husband's parlour game obsessed family are instead centered around a harried avoidance. Ready or Not then greedily holds onto its ingrates and cack-handed buffoons, denying Grace a piecemeal vengeance just so her tormentors can suddenly ripen during the thwarted ritual that closes the film.