![]() ![]() The bride goes off to hide, still wearing her wedding dress, unaware that the Le Domases’ aim in the game is to find and kill her before dawn. In order to honor the terms by which the Le Domas ancestors secured their wealth, Grace and her new relatives must play a game of hide-and-seek. “Like my wife.” At night, the family retreats to their game room-all burnished wood, wrought iron, and candlelight-for a final induction rite. Her dissolute new brother-in-law (Adam Brody) instructs her not to take it personally: “They’re just trying to figure out if you’re a gold-digging whore,” he whispers as they pose for photographs. ![]() During the ceremony, three svelte housemaids eye Grace with silent disdain. The Le Domases include a frantic, pill-popping sister (Melanie Scrofano), who shows up so late that she misses the vows a chic, impish mother (Andie MacDowell), who urges Grace not to worry that her blood isn’t blue and an austere, scowling aunt (Nicky Guadagni), who wears an aubergine shawl in the style of a straitjacket. Grace, a former foster child, so craves the embrace of a family that she dismisses the oddities of her groom’s clan. “We prefer dominion,” he tells her on their wedding day, as prim relatives take their seats on the lawn of a remote manse. Samara Weaving gives a game and playful performance as Grace, a wide-eyed, impressionable bride who’s preparing to wed Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien), the uneasy scion of a board-game dynasty. ![]() For all its gory ornamentation, “Ready or Not” has more in common with “Meet the Parents” than “The Hunt.” Its antagonists are not callous one-per-centers but crazed in-laws, whose bumbling efforts to guard their family name bring about high jinks of escalating, and highly entertaining, absurdity. The nobles are bracing for a bloodletting, but theirs is no sombre enactment of deep-held prejudice or state-sanctioned violence. In the trailer, dolled-up aristocrats descend to a basement whose walls showcase dated weapons beside stuffed moose heads and oil portraits of Civil War-era forebears. Christopher Murphy and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, “Ready or Not” seems to rest, as many of its predecessors have, on a foundation of class warfare. The latest offering in the hide-and-seek horror subgenre is “Ready or Not,” a new film from Fox Searchlight Pictures. “We pay for everything, so this country belongs to us,” one of the rich says, with a titter, during a trailer for the film that shows victims choking on ball gags, sputtering blood, and crawling through grass to avoid blasts of rifle fire. Even by genre standards, though, “The Hunt” appeared to offer a disturbing depiction of the American culture war as a clash of shameless violence. ![]() More than a few films in recent memory-“The Belko Experiment,” “ The Purge,” “ The Hunger Games”-have deployed a similar premise, literalizing worlds in which listless patricians make the indigent masses their prey. Earlier this month, after the back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Universal Pictures decided to cancel the release of “The Hunt,” a dystopian slasher film in which “globalist élites” round up so-called deplorables, from red states, to stalk and slaughter for sport. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |