Samara Weaving in Ready or Not. Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Ready or Not is one of those low-budget horror films that is surprisingly good. Modestly budgeted at $6 million with no actors that anyone has heard of before except Andie MacDowell (which tells you all you need to know about the casting), the film has already made $20 million. It is shot beautifully, which certainly helps, and is set in a magnificent location for this kind of story - a big Gothic mansion, oppressive in its opulence and with lots of room to be chased around in.
The plot is simple and straightforward. A rich guy is marrying down (in the eyes of his family) to a woman of lower social class. After the nuptials are over, the family hunts her throughout their mansion and tries to kill her for the rest of the night. And that’s about it. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, never taking the premise too seriously and poking fun at the whole idea while it goes through the motions of killing off characters in increasingly inventive and violent ways. There is certainly something to be said for elegant simplicity.
This film also enters the national conversation at a very opportune moment, as much fufflebluff has recently occurred thanks to a film called The Hunt about rich left coast elites hunting Trump supporters being canned by the studio for fear of offending the worst parts of our society. This led me to wonder, rhetorically, whether a film like The Purge should ever have been made? And I came to the not-at-all surprising conclusion that yes, of course if should have been made dummies. Further proof that films about hunting people are a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment has now arrived in Ready or Not, which is both quite entertaining, if nothing too special, and also a film very much about rich people hunting poor people.
The fact that this movie has been released, and that society did not implode immediately and indeed it was possible for adults to enjoy it without feeling compelled to run out and buy a gun and then hunt their son’s fiancees, would suggest that the fears of a critic like conservative Youtube blogger Grace Randolph were a bit overblown.
So hopefully this is the final word on the matter: it is perfectly acceptable to make, and to enjoy, films about humans hunting other humans as long as you are, you know, conscious of the dividing line between reality and fantasy and understand that what you are watching is a fictional film made for your enjoyment and not a documentary.