To see the parting shot of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2019 comedy-horror romp Ready Or Not revisited at the start of its sequel, Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, is to know disappointment, however mild. You wouldn’t expand on the Mona Lisa; you shouldn’t expand on Samara Weaving numbly smoking a cigarette butt in a gory wedding dress against the backdrop of a burning palatial mansion, either. It’s an indelible image in Weaving’s career as a horror star. Even if there’s a logical real-life conclusion to the moment—even if EMTs chauffeuring Grace, bloodsoaked and spent, to the closest hospital in Ready Or Not 2‘s opening scene makes sense—its effect is retroactive buzzkill.
Grace’s triumph over the Le Domas family in Ready Or Not is short-lived but well-deserved; Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett pull the rug out from under her in the sequel, like Lucy yanking away the football in time to make schlemiel out of Charlie Brown. Because this is America—and fine, because the evidence does point to her culpability—she’s the prime suspect in the case of her in-laws’ massacre. Telling Detective Bassett (Grant Nickalls), or frankly anyone, the truth seems like wasted effort. Nonetheless, when Grace’s younger sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), shows up, she helpfully recaps the first movie despite years of estrangement from one another.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, working from a script by returning writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, rob Faith of any opportunity to digest Grace’s story: Another visitor, Bill Wilkinson (Kevin Durand), storms into the facility in a coked-up frenzy, hellbent on killing Grace. The Le Domases weren’t the only devil-worshipping social elites in the world, a plot twist that’ll surprise nobody who keeps up with current events. The Le Domases belonged to a cabal of likeminded sickos, and by beating them at their own game, Grace has unknowingly set off a domino chain that’s culminated in said sickos, represented by Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus Danforth (Shawn Hatosy), Ignacio El Caido (Néstor Carbonell), Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), and Madhu Rajan (Varun Saranga), deploying her as prey in another hunt at another palatial mansion, with Faith thrown into proceedings as a bonus.
Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come hews closely to the original’s formula, adding a succession feud subplot for no appreciable reason other than to have David Cronenberg echo his part from the fourth season of the Chiller TV series Slasher. As horror premises go, “outrun the ultra-wealthy and armed Satanic cultists before they kill you” packs the average filmgoer’s recommended daily intake of storytelling drama; no supplements are needed to enhance the film’s effects, though it is nice that Grace and Faith have foils in Ursula and Titus, the sibling duo likeliest to kill them and secure the “high seat”–the position of utmost power in their organization’s hierarchy.
Like any game, Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come comes with a rulebook. As head counsel to Mr. Le Bail, the families’ infernal benefactor and ruthless gamemaker, Elijah Wood so crisply delineates the competition’s structure and guidelines as to make underworld legalese compelling. His minor performance is a phlegmatic pleasure; if the narrative knots are unnecessary, at least Wood, and the rest of the ensemble, have fun tying them together. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have done terrific work over the years building up an acting stable in the post-anthology stretch of their careers: note the overlap between Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come and Abigail, which featured both Newton and Durand in supporting roles. That, plus the directors’ collective obsession with making their characters pop like tomatoes in a microwave, adds welcome cohesion across their work. They’ve got their visual scheme nailed down, and they know what they want for their actors—a big party where everybody’s splattered with goop.
Maybe that’s why the film’s setup is such a deflating bummer. Weaving is great at expressing helpless surrender and whiteknuckle petrification, but her movies tend to pay off her raw terror with unhinged ferocity and brute-force indignance at having been imperiled in the first place. The effect of her performances is cathartic, frequently hysterical, and key to Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come‘s success. The forced reconsideration of Weaving’s enduring work in the first movie is perhaps unavoidable, but certainly not ideal. Happily, the narrative moves ahead quickly, the better to demonstrate new, inventive methods of reducing murder-happy billionaires to sloppy carcasses in between beats where Weaving and Newton get to play off of one another.
Their sororal friction undergirds the drama in Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come and provides a quiet rebuke of trauma horror, in which supernatural goings-on coincidentally dovetail with protagonists’ lifelong emotional baggage, spurring confrontations with both. If they reunited under normal circumstances rather than under pain of death, Grace and Faith would have the exact same beef with each other and get into the exact same arguments; the families’ game only inconveniences their reconciliation instead of lubricating it. Whether the critique is intended or not, it lands, and gives grounding to the thoroughly ungrounded plot without polluting Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s macabre comic atmosphere. They’re not interested in traumatizing anyone. They’re happier dousing their cast with red dye and corn syrup; if they had to pick a game to play for Le Bail, it’d probably be something out of Double Dare.
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Writer: Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy
Starring: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, Nestor Carbonell, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, David Cronenberg, Kevin Durand
Release Date: March 20, 2026
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