Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Ready or Not Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 4, 2019

Adages have seemed to offer some salient commentaries for several films I've reviewed lately, and one in particular is relevant to the film under discussion: when you get married, you don’t just wed your spouse, you wed his or her entire family. In the case of Ready or Not, it’s an adage that Grace (Samara Weaving) probably should have thought about long and hard before agreeing to enter into a marriage with Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien), despite the fact that Alex himself seems to have wanted a divorce from his family (so to speak), having been estranged from them for years before his impending nuptials brought him at least temporarily back into the familial fold. Ready or Not is a kind of wackily subversive horror entry that also has more than its fair share of laughs, even if some of them are of the gross out variety. The Le Domas clan is revealed to have built their considerable fortune on marketing games of various kinds, first as playing card vendors during the Civil War, and then branching out into board games and ultimately ownership of professional sports teams. The Le Domas family also has some rather odd traditions as well, as documented in the bizarre opening sequence which sees two young boys running panicked through a mansion, with one of them hiding in a wardrobe while the other witnesses what appears to be some kind of ritual murder. There are some significant if subtle clues about family dynamics shared in this brief but chaotic opening sequence, and it augurs well for a film that has manifold surface pleasures, but which often offers surprising depth in not just its pitch black humor but also some of its deconstructions of family dysfunctions.

Ready or Not has an underlying plot conceit that requires one thing and one thing only from the audience: complete and utter surrender. Films about Faustian bargains are a dime a dozen and have been for some time, but one of Ready or Not's amusing takes on that premise is to visit the "bargain" several generations down the line from when the deal was made. That said, the truly gonzo and more or less completely unexplained underpinning of events here is why the Devil figure, a mysterious Civil War Era guy named Mr. Le Bail, would have constructed such an elaborate set of seemingly random rules to govern the compact he made in the 19th century with a Le Domas ancestor, an ancestor who helped to establish the current monolithic Le Domas fortune with perhaps a little "help" from his "friend". There are brief expository "Moishe the Explainer" moments along the way, one of them delivered by current paterfamilias Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny), and then later more "facts" offered by Alex (again mostly seemingly random and posited only to make things kinda sorta make "sense"). By that time, the family tradition of "initiating" a new member with a game chosen supposedly at random by the new member from a kind of magical box which originated with Mr. Le Bail*, has offered up the prime horror aspect of the enterprise: while many of the potential games are harmless bouts of checkers or Old Maid, if the initiate has the bad luck to draw a Hide and Seek card, that means that the family newcomer has to hide until they are found — and killed — by the Le Domas hordes.

Ready or Not probably tries to stuff a patently insane amount of backstory and character introductions into its first fifteen or twenty minutes, but the film is buoyed by sharp writing, even if it’s all unabashedly arch and pretty much played to the second balcony by everyone. In that regard, Czerny in particular basically spends the entire film screaming his lungs out at various characters, with Nicki Guadagni not far behind as crazed Aunt Helene. But even the more relatively tamped down performances, as in Andie McDowell’s kind of witchlike wife to Tony and mother to Alex, have a kind of bizarre, almost Addams Family-esque, manic quality to them.

The film has some spectacular gore sequences along the way, several of which seem intentionally designed to evoke horror and laughter in about equal measure. The whole middle part of the film of course features Grace on the run from the family, with Alex attempting to offer some fairly lame support (the film tries desperately, and probably fails solidly, to deliver a motive behind all of this for Alex). There’s some subtext here that probably could have been explored even further dealing with a bunch of pampered rich people attempting to murder someone with various old fashioned weapons of individual if not mass destruction.

*I'm not sure if this was a continuity error or simply yet another example of me thinking way too hard about various picayune plot elements, but when Tony places the blank card into the magic box, and then when Grace pulls the "reveal" card a minute later, it has a Le Domas logo. If this was Mr. Le Bail's box and trick, wouldn't it have his logo on it?

Ready or Not Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ready or Not is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists Arri Alexa Minis as having been utilized, but fails to specify at what resolution the DI was finished (I'm presuming 2K; as always with my reviews, if anyone can point to authoritative, verifiable data stating otherwise, let me know via private message and I'll happily update this review). As can be easily made out in many of the screenshots accompanying this review, a lot of the film is either lit or graded to feature pretty sickly looking yellow tones, something that kind of enhances the overall Gothic atmosphere of the Le Domas mansion, but which can occasionally lead to slight deficits on elements of fine detail like the lace on Grace's bridal veil. Directors Radio Silence (Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz favor a lot of extreme close-ups where, despite even more deep grading choices (some on the blue end of the spectrum), fine detail is considerably more evident. Some of the gore effects are more than convincing and may provoke squirms in more squeamish viewers. As with most Fox Blu-ray releases, I noticed no compression anomalies.

Ready or Not Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ready or Not features a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that really doesn't exploit that many startle effects, but can still provoke traditional startle reactions courtesy of elements like a sudden gunshot. Despite a lot of the film taking place within the (considerable) confines of the Le Domas mansion, there's really solid engagement of the side and rear channels helping to detail ambient environmental sounds as well as spatial differentiations between characters. Dialogue is rendered without any problems whatsoever on this fun and enjoyable track.

Ready or Not Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Let the Games Begin: The Making of Ready or Not (1080p; 42:28) is a fun multi-part featurette that gets into a lot of production data. There is a lot of behind the scenes footage in this, as well as good interviews with various cast and crew members.


• Gag Reel (1080p; 4:05)


• Audio Commentary by Radio Silence and Samara Weaving


• Gallery

  On Set Photography (1080p; 1:05)

  
  

  Le Domas Family Games (1080p; 1:20)

• Red Band Trailer (1080p; 2:26)

Ready or Not Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ready or Not ultimately probably doesn't have any outsized ambitions, delivering a horror outing that's drenched in black comedy as well as at least relatively copious amounts of gore, but it kind of surprisingly manages to delve into family dysfunctions in a kind of cheeky, anarchic way. Technical merits are solid and the supplementary package very enjoyable. Recommended.