2019 really said "fuck rich people" and I am down with that message.

Ready or Not is a pretty fun horror comedy about how rich people are just plain crazy and it's a contained thrill ride of the attempt of our main character to escape from these crazy rich people trying to kill her. 

It's pretty rad, Samantha Weaving does a great job, she gets a lot of great little moments and one-liners. Her character is one of the horror protagonists who is actually smart and makes decisions that feel rational. She's essentially the audience stand-in and she's great in that role.

This movie does a great job of balancing these tense moments of suspense and gore, with lots of really funny moments in between, while still weaving all that together with commentary on rich dynasty families.

It's showing how these rich families are so selfish in preserving their place in society that if they have to make a sacrifice to Lè Satan occasionally, they're more than willing to, if it means they get to bask in their privilege. It also examines how rich people born into rich families simply aren't like the rest of us, their traditions and way of life are so engrained in them from youth that even if they try to break away from that, it's always instilled in them from a young age and that's a hard thing to break out of, and it ends up that each generation keeps perpetuating that same horrific status quo...

However, I do think that message gets a little muddled by the end with the ways the brothers shift. Alex starts out as being estranged from the family and hating this tradition, and Daniel seems to completely embrace it. By the end they both shift, Daniel realises the errors of the whole system and tries to help Grace escape, and Alex gives into the whole ritual and almost kills his wife. Daniel being redeemed by the end then kinda negates that idea that it's engrained in rich people to follow tradition, because in the end he went against it, so it feels a little confused in that aspect.

Also, Alex's shift into giving into the ritual seems to be driven by him thinking Grace killed Daniel, and when Alex catches Grace in the middle of murderin', the implication seems to be that he thinks she killed his brother, but she didn't say anything like "oh he helped me escape" or something like that. It might not have stopped him eventually turning over, since he did still see her beat his mother into a bloody pulp, but it felt like a very weird scene.

Speaking of weird scenes, the ending was a bit strange. Turns out Satan was real the whole time and these rich people start exploding into pools of blood. Which is cool I guess, but idk it just felt a little anti-climatic. Like I guess that was just my expectations because going in, I knew next to nothing beyond the description on Letterboxd, so I was expecting it to be more of a pick-off movie, with Samantha Weaving going around, killing them all off one at a time. Instead nobody other than the servants die until the third act and a vast majority of the family just poof away into a cloud of bloody dust. It just didn't hit me. 

I think some of the technical aspects also bugged me a bit, like I don't think it's that well shot and edited, I mean in a geographical sense. The lighting looks great and the production design on the house is awesome, but you don't really get a sense of where people are in relation to one another sometimes, which deflated scenes a little bit. Also lotta handheld shots, could've done with less of those.

I did have a good time with it, despite all my complaining. It's a really funny movie, it's got a lot of good gore and thrills, it's got fairly solid social commentary (although I think Knives Out did the same thing just more in depth, but I don't wanna compare them because they're going for 2 completely different genres). I think it's a real good movie, a little rough around the edges in some areas, but it's campy, it's fun, it's dark and I dig it