Rating: 6/10 

     October is known to be the spookiest month of the year. In the spirit of Halloween, it’s filled with creepy costumes, haunted houses, and of course, scary movies.  Ready or Not (2019), directed by Matt Bettinelli and Tyler Gillett, follows Grace Le Domas (played by Samara Weaving)—a bride who can’t wait to marry her soon-to-be husband Alex in his family’s beautiful wealthy estate. But what Grace doesn’t know is that at midnight, she has to participate in  “The Game” as a tradition of her husband’s family. When she draws the game Hide and Seek, this seemingly family-friendly game becomes a bloody and murderous trial where Grace’s in-laws have to kill her before dawn in order to break their curse. 

     Ready or Not primarily takes place at the Le Domas Estate. The big mansion  has several long, unsettling hallways that set the mood for how uncomfortable the protagonist is while hiding from her killers. The dim lighting also enhances the setting of scary rooms, and the creaks of the floor really add to the suspense of the whole area. One thing that stood out was how Grace wore the same wedding dress throughout the movie but had to alter it at different times in order to survive. The viewer can witness the change in the dress before their eyes  — at the beginning, it is beautiful and long and clean, but in the end the dress has become cut and torn with blood everywhere. 

      Ready or Not really challenges ideas about family relations and how far one should go to help their family. It also shows how Grace was easily manipulated because she was such a vulnerable character. She was an orphan who went from foster home to foster home, so she never had a permanent family. Grace’s desire to have a nice family that lets her in makes her go out of her way to try to fit in with them. For example, when Grace meets her mother-in-law Becky Le Domas (played by Andie Macdowell), she feels pressured to smoke, which she normally doesn’t do. This shows how she is trying to be different from her regular self to be accepted. However, as the night goes on, Grace’s patience with her new family’s crazy traditions visibly gets thinner, and she eventually kills her mother in law. Alex, however, faces a different dilemma — though he distanced himself from his family because of their unreasonable traditions, he is now forced to choose between helping his wife survive his family or helping his family, who raised him, loved him, and sacrificed for him, hunt his wife.

     This movie is a great movie if you’re a beginner to horror  movies. Ready or Not is a mix of blood and gore with comedy. Although in my opinion some of the comedy is a little too over the top, most of the jokes seem funny and genuine without pushing the movie  into the comedy genre.. The graphic scenes don’t make you feel extremely uncomfortable but still maintain the aspects of the horror genre and make you feel empathy for the characters. In a scene, Grace has to get out of a goat carcass pit, and when she climbs out her hand gets impaled by a nail. You can see how the nail was foreshadowed, giving the scene a sense of realism and empathy. We the audience while watching the scene can feel very uncomfortable with Grace as she has to take her hand out. 

    Overall, Ready or Not presents a classic take on horror movies with unsettling settings, murder, gore and comedy. It’s a good movie to curl up and watch with your siblings to  get both a good scare and a good laugh.