To me, this is essentially a perfect horror movie.
It has everything I want in a work of entertainment. It has a fantastic story. It has gorgeous production design, which yields gorgeous environments and gorgeous clothes. It has a flawless house and it also has rich Satanists, which are my favorite.
The overall quality of Ready or Not is extremely high, especially when considering the relatively modest budget. Yet this yields is a bounty of extremely stylish design and fabulousIv eccentric architecture. It might be my favorite horror movie mansion, and it looked like real rich people lived in it. I think that in another film, in another story that happened to be set in this location, you could easily say that the house is a character in the film, which is a song our listeners have heard from me more than once.
But I think the clothes are also incredible, including that transforming wedding dress, of which there were 17 produced in various stages of disrepair. Here, I think it's the dress that's the character in the film, and it reflects the entire experience of the central character. It's an incredible, metaphoric costume design, executed in a completely spectacular way that is dramaturgically tied to the narrative, and that costume serves so many purposes: It becomes a weapon, it’s a tourniquet. Grace uses the costume to literally hold herself together as she is being torn apart by her experiences over the course of this picture.
And as you pointed out, Eric, the actors are all giving these incredibly solid performances, including Andy McDowell, who is not one of our strongest actresses. She really serves the material well and I think is very well served by it. And of course, there are incredible set pieces in this film. It is effectively a string of set pieces that just continually one-up themselves as the story goes along.
I love nothing more than a scary movie that happens to be tinged with some really deep, dark humor. And this feels something like a horror comedy. It has some Old Dark House to it, in the sense that the fun comes mainly from its wit and the moments of levity that are sprinkled over the runtime of this film. And most of those happen to feature my favorite actress, Nicki Guadagni as Aunt Helene.
In general, I find it really tense or intense, more than scary. It feels kind of like a metronome is just ticking away in the background throughout the entire thing. It's just really propulsive in a way, which makes the tidy timeline of the story feel exactly right.
To hear our take on Ready or Not, click here.
Bradford Louryk