Ready or Not 2 Review: The Devil Is in the Bloody Good Details

How does one cheat the Devil? With a lot of style and grace if you’re Samara Weaving and Radio Silence, the charmers who gave us the perversely delightful Ready or Not seven years ago. Close to a decade later, the same creative team, which also includes scribes Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, are back and doubling-or-nothing their wager with Mr. Le Bail (Lucifer by a fancier, blue-blooded name). And incredulously, they’re coming out ahead.

To be clear, the blood that pulsed and poured throughout their 2019 horror satire was indeed blue, aristocratic, privileged and, before the end, combustible. Which on a certain level made a sequel a tricky proposition. The first film is essentially a great gag wherein a working class gal named Grace (Weaving) marries into one of the rich and powerful families of ancient wealth, only to discover they’re, um, Devil-worshipping satanists who gained their success by selling their souls to Old Nick in exchange for obscene wealth and power. They also need to sacrifice a bride to Beelzebub every generation or two in order keep the pact alive. If they fail to do so by the first dawn after the wedding night, they go poof into a warm red mist. That’s what the regal Le Dormas clan believed, anyway, and the first Ready or Not got a lot of mileage out of Grace and the audience second-guessing whether the pact was real or these were just the indulgences of rich eccentrics.

When that film ended with the Le Domas’ going boom-boom, and Grace standing alone as the delirious winner of the best hide-and-seek game ever, it was nothing short of euphoric—a giddiness that transcends the simple favors of horror or comedy. What is there left to say, really?

In terms of Grace’s journey from wide-eyed believer in fairy tale happily-ever-afters to a burned out bride fed up with the in-laws, not really a whole lot. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come introduces us to Grace’s younger estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton)—and a decent gag of a new patrician sneering “fucking Irish-Catholics” at their names—but the heartwarming story of Grace and Faith finding each other again is ultimately a nice bit of frosting on an already crimson-dotted wedding cake. It gives new dimensions for Weaving to play, but only until we get to see her go full bridezilla on the latest Masters of the Universe. And in truth, we are just waiting for those absolutely gonzo bloodletting set-pieces in Ready or Not 2, of which there are many.

Weaving and Newton have a nice chemistry, especially in the sequences where they side-eye each other with guarded annoyance stemming from the fact that Grace left the younger Faith behind at their foster home when she moved to New York at 18 alone. But the real pleasure of the movie is how mirthful directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—two-thirds of the Radio Silence creative collective—can be while building out the draconian lore and devilish details in their ever expanding world of the evil elite.

As it turns out, the Le Dormas were just one of many rich billionaire broods who made a deal with Mr. Le Bail. In fact, it seems to be pretty much all of the globe’s top one percent who are in on the action, who betwixt one another run the world’s governments and social orders from behind-the-scenes. This is demonstrated when we are introduced to Mr. Danforth (David Cronenberg) watching an international crisis on television. He picks up his phone and orders a “ceasefire.” Seconds later a breathless cable news anchor announces “a ceasefire has been reached” in the televised quagmire.

It would seem the Danforths were the greatest rival the Le Dormas’ knew on a council of the world’s Devil-worshipping families, albeit with the Le Dormas’ in the highest seat. But now that the Le Dormas dynasty is extinguished, the big chair is vacant. Alas, that is where poor Grace comes in. As revealed to her by a smirking, well-groomed retainer simply known as the Lawyer (Elijah Wood), the only way for another family to fill the empty high seat is to succeed where the Le Dormas’ failed and hunt Grace down in another lethal game of hide and seek before dawn. This makes her prey to Cronenberg’s nasty twin heirs Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), as well as a whole ensemble of kooky character actors and genre favorites like Kevin Durand.

If Grace, and a conscripted Faith—who is used as leverage against the older sister—can survive the night, the pair might just end up with the power of the Devil on Earth (read: a real-life tech mogul). But to do that they are going to have to fight their way across 18 holes, various ballrooms outfitted for fancy weddings, and every other stereotype you might expect from the film’s country club setting that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago.

Ready or Not was never subtle in its eat-the-rich social satire. It was, however, early in tackling that in the new zeitgeist since the first movie came out a handful of months before Parasite and Knives Out, never mind the growing trend of class schadenfreude in the 2020s that’s coincided with the growing consolidation of wealth at the top. So if the first movie was tangibly angry in its social satire, Here I Come seems much more at peace with its punch-drunk gallows humor. Indeed, after a bravado opening sequence that marries the final scene of the 2019 film seamlessly with the 2026 picture’s kick-off—scored, appropriately, to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”—Grace’s rescue by the authorities quickly descends into her willingly throwing back on the blood-soaked bridal gown from the first movie.

“It gives mobility,” she insists to her sister as they duck around a deserted hospital gurney while being hunted. It also is emblematic of both Grace and the film’s nonchalant and chipper nihilism. There’s no way out, so we might as well get comfy while making a night of it.

For Radio Silence and their scribes, that coziness arises from basking in the neuroses of its moneyed antagonists. The big bads of the Danforth country club is like a retinue of SNL characters gathering at the Bohemian Grove (a real-life meet-up for the elite in Northern California, which for decades has gained whispers of pagan rituals). Given the direction of the world in the last seven years, and specifically with regard to the drip, drip, drip of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the concept of satanic elites no longer seems as sinister as it does mundane.

Hence various scenes of the privileged and bored who’ve come to partake in a new game of hide and seek being more concerned with the hors d’oeuvres being served during the hunt than the actual kill—or sequences of another thwarted bride in their ranks being obsessed with challenging Grace to a duel on a dance floor where they got Bonnie Tyler queued up. As the most reasonable seeming of the hunters, Sarah Michelle Gellar gets a little monologue about how there are no good guys or bad guys anymore. Everything is gray.

Of course, she is saying this to a woman she intends to ritualistically murder in an offer to Satan in order to attain yet greater power. In this way, Ready or Not 2 is a rejection both of the times it is made in and the actual nihilistic despair of so many other, bitter horror movies these days.

As with the first film and every chilly laugher Radio Silence has made since —including the two best Scream movies made in this century, plus Abigail—Ready or Not 2 is buoyant in its optimism and good vibes, even while staring into the abyss. If the world is doomed, we can at least take catharsis in a fantasy where Grace relaxes in her murder-gown while eviscerating the ruling class with (eventually) a smile on her face.

As with the original film, the sequel transcends during its climax, this time with Grace, Faith, and everyone left alive vanishing into the country club’s most hallowed of unholy sites for a ritual involving goats, a pit with spikes, and a whole lot of blood. It’s moments like this where Weaving shines brightest while delivering one-liners, coup de’graces, and sweet, sweet wish fulfillment that turns the devilish into the divine, and a second round of a bad wedding-match into a damn good party. Mazel tov.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opened at SXSW on March 13 and releases wide on March 20.