The biggest mistake anyone can make is to underestimate Samara Weaving. Her characters are indomitable (heads up, heavily armed global elitists) and the actress herself has a string of hits that would make any horror icon envious: The Babysitter, Ready or Not, and the under-appreciated dialogue-free tension-fest Azrael. Her new film, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come premiered at SXSW back-to -back with another Samara starrer, Over Your Dead Body. It’s a good year to be Samara.
There’s no doubt about Ms. Weaving’s ability to embody a character who will hold an audience in rapt attention from start to finish. The question of Ready or Not 2 is whether it rises to the high bar set by the original, captained by Radio Silence directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, returning with screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy.
Sequeling is tricky, and there’s more than one approach. What a sequel has in its corner is incumbency. The original must have had some measure of success to offer another serving to viewers. The challenge is how to recapture the familiar magic of the first installment in a way that feels new and surprising, that makes it feel like it did the first time. A sequel can expand its scope: The Empire Strikes Back budget was 200% larger than 1977’s Star Wars, giving us new worlds, tauntauns, and AT-ATs. It can enhance the franchise’s characteristics: Evil Dead is essentially reshot to become Evil Dead 2, where the violence, gore, practical effects, and mayhem are ratcheted up dramatically. And a sequel can evolve from the original. Think James Cameron’s Aliens, melding the Giger-inflected nightmare fuel of Alien with an action-genre military operation.
Ready or Not 2 is primarily an expansion and enhancement of the original, as the heads of the cult’s remaining families converge on a palatial playground to begin a new round of Hide and Seek with the Bride, following her highly unanticipated survival and the demise of the Le Domas clan. According to the arcane rules of their diabolical covenant, the winning family will take the signet ring — until recently held by Chester Danforth (director David Cronenberg in a wry, sardonic cameo) — giving them controlling interest in the cult and in world affairs. Danforth’s children Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) will stop at nothing to wrest it back. Others vying for the ring include Ignacio El Caído (Nestor Carbonell), the Brothers Rajan (Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng) and her hopeless man-child of a son (Antony Hall). The signet ring and the game are fastidiously overseen by The Lawyer, played by Elijah Wood (you may remember another rather significant ring left in his charge). And if any family member doesn't play by the rules? Viewers of Ready or Not know what happens. Bloof! Spontaneous hemoglobular combustion.
Picking up immediately after the events of the original film, Samara Weaving’s Grace MacCaullay is weary, traumatized, and handcuffed to her hospital bed, under suspicion of having killed the La Domases. She’ll face a hunting party comprised of wealthy elitists, bred to value power alone, sociopaths from the cradle. But she has something on her side the families don’t anticipate, and that Grace herself hadn’t counted on. Faith MacCaullay (a dynamite Kathryn Newton) arrives during Grace’s brief hospitalization. Faith is Grace’s little sister and only living relative, still her emergency contact in official records. They’ve been estranged for seven years, Grace having left their shared foster home at eighteen, leaving Faith to hurl accusations of abandonment. Circumstances force their reunion as Faith is captured along with Grace to play Hide and Seek. And while she argues, more than once, that leaving Faith in their childhood foster home was the best she could do at the time, we see Grace struggling to convince herself that this was the case.
Herein lies the third measure of sequeling: Grace evolves. From the first film, she’s fought to maintain autonomy as she takes on the obligations of holy matrimony. In the sequel, Grace faces an impossible choice to protect her sister. Their already rocky relationship undergoes a trial by fire which will leave their sisterhood reforged or in ashes. Assuming they survive, of course. They’re pitted against blood-thirsty billionaires on a mission to control the world, powered by a pact with the devil, an apparition known by the families as “Mr. Le Bail.” The humor of pitting Grace and Faith against a demonic cult is not lost on us.
Does Ready or Not 2 recapture the magic of the original? If the crowd’s reaction at the film’s SXSW world premiere at Austin’s Paramount Theater is any indication, the answer is clearly yes. It’s a witty, violent popcorn flick, squeezing ample juice out of its perfect casting. Stakes are raised, fortunes are reversed rapidly, and you might even get a little misty eyed watching two strangers wonder if they can become sisters again, all while evading evisceration and a hundred other grisly fates. If you liked Ready or Not, you’ll love the sequel.
