Ready or Not (2019)

Grace (Samara Weaving) certainly didn’t expect that marrying into the rich (through board games!), rude and rather eccentric family of Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) would end up with her spending her wedding night quite the way it’s turning out. There’s a family ritual involved everyone marrying into the family must go through, you see, so whosoever becomes part of the family has to draw a card containing the name of a game from a box. That box has been handed down through the generations and comes with a nice little story of what sounds decidedly like a family deal with the devil. Poor Grace, or lucky Grace, depending on one’s point of view, alas, draws the somewhat problematic card of “Hide and Seek”.

Nobody tells her what the special family variant of this single deadly game in the deck entails, and soon, her new family is hunting Grace through the house trying to hobble her with weapons and catch her so they can sacrifice her to Satan. Neither Alex nor his black sheep brother Daniel (Adam Brody) are quite in with this particular program, but family is difficult, and rich boys tend to lack backbone. Man, but the rich are different.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not is a pretty great example of what focussed direction, a game cast, and wonderful timing can make out of a very simple basic idea. One could hold it against the horror comedy that its social criticism isn’t terribly complicated and just a bit obvious – a problem it shares with most “the x are terrible” films - but the film does put visible effort not in the basic situation but into why in the hell anyone would take part in this thing – apart from as it will turn out very well justified fear for one’s own life – and so those family members that aren’t total caricatures make actual sense as people doing absurd and violent things for believably shitty people reasons. Which I believe to be quite an achievement to get into a film that is basically one long sequence of chases through a couple of rooms and corridors and a patch of woods with captures and reversals of fortune. It’s fascinating how small the scale of the film actually is when one thinks about it; yet the actual movie never feels small or constrained, but focussed and doing exactly what it sets out to do in the best way possible.

This is also one of the rare horror comedies to always manage to find the right split between the jokes and the suspense, often intermingling both brilliantly. There’s nary a moment where the humour stands in the way of the suspense or vice versa, leaving us with a film that is as exciting as it is funny.

In large part, this is the achievement of the lean and minimal yet very clever script and of a director duo who really make the most of the opportunities that come with this sort of thing. However, there’s also a great cast who can shift between the coarser and subtler moments of the writing with ease, adding dimension without showboating. Samara Weaving is obviously great, throwing herself into every single scene with the kind of controlled abandon that makes a great horror actress, while shifting from dry quipping to actual human emotion and back again with natural ease, but the supporting cast hits every note as wonderfully. Why, even Andie McDowell does not seem to have been made out of wood for once.


In addition to all that, Ready or Not looks rather fantastic too, making as much of wood-panelled walls and soft light as any horror film I can remember. It’s a joy to watch from start to finish, even avoiding the lame twist ending that some horror filmmakers now seem to think is mandated by law in the genre, simply wrapping up its plot in a fitting manner.

Isabelle (2018)

Larissa (Amanda Crew) and Matt Kane (Adam Brody) have just moved into their new suburban home, which they bought to have more room for their new-born that’s going to pop any day now. Alas, when the supposedly creepy daughter (Zoë Belkin) of their strange neighbour looks at Larissa would-be creepily from an upstairs window, something happens, and Larissa has a miscarriage.

Not surprisingly completely bereft, and brought back into a completely empty home where she is left utterly alone, Larissa first begins to hallucinate the crying of a baby in what was supposed to be the nursery, and sometimes even hallucinates a teddy bear into a merry little baby. She quickly becomes convinced that the creepy daughter, who turns out to be paraplegic and mute after her long dead father abused her and, as a helpful online newspaper article exposits, “dedicated her to Satan”, is sending her very bad vibes. And wouldn’t you know it, she just might be right!

I’m not usually one to get out the morality club when talking about genre movies, but when a film like Robert Heydon’s Isabelle uses things like a stillbirth and the following mental illness of the mother as the basic for its tale of possession, I do expect it to either put actual effort into what it does or leave things well enough alone, or put it into the hands of better filmmakers, respectively. Unfortunately, these filmmakers didn’t, instead leaving us with this odious mess that exploits some terrible shit that happens to actual people often enough without even being terribly good exploitation.

The script is a complete mess, with characters that change their opinions and basic traits randomly from scene to scene, a plot that takes ages to get to a point the audience has seen coming half an hour ago, and a structure that simply doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the passage of time. Now, (improbable) defenders of this mess might argue that some of these weaknesses might be explained by the film’s ending that suggests these things haven’t been completely real, but I know a crap horror movie kicker ending that has nothing to do with the film that came before it when I see one; I have, after all, by now witnessed hundreds of them.

The worst example of the script’s failings is probably the character of Matt, played by Brody with all the bafflement any sane person would feel when encountering his scripted behaviour. Matt’s the kind of guy who, when he finds his wife acting strangely shortly after the stillbirth, grabs the next priest he can find, mumbles something about possession and asks the guy to visit his wife and him, only to then, when the priest arrives the next day, argue there’s no such thing as possession, and his wife only suffers from grief, without anything having changed in the scenes in between. Even better is the moment later in the film when the very same guy who brought up possession in the first place also explains he doesn’t believe in “this woo-woo stuff”. Do I have to add that the film also sees fit to have him go into the mandatory speech about how he can’t cope with his wife’s behaviour any longer even before their damn kid is even buried!? But then, he’s also the kind of guy who leaves his wife completely alone the day she comes out of the hospital after a stillbirth without him or the film giving much of a reason for that apart from him just having started a new job. The film clearly can’t see there’s anything strange about that at all; it’s as if this was written by aliens.

And let’s not even get me started on the film’s general treatment of Larissa’s mental unravelling, how badly it is timed and structured, and how little sense it makes on a psychological level. But then, what do filmmaking aliens know about us strange hu-mans?


Because that’s clearly not bad enough, Isabelle also fails at the most basic element of even the dumbest horror flick: being at least a wee bit scary or disturbing. Heydon just can’t seem to be able to time anything right when it comes to scaring his audience. Even the most primitive jump scare doesn’t sit, more complex set-ups fall plainly into the realm of the ridiculous, the possessed ghost girl make-up of Isabelle is just silly with an added heap total ridiculousness whenever her red flashlight eyes start digitally glowing. It’s pretty astonishing how a film that should be full of psychologically disturbing stuff can’t even get simple fun house scares right, but that’s Isabelle for you. To be fair, neither Heydon nor writer Donald Martin have much, if any, experience with horror, but that’s not really much of an excuse after I’ve had to sit through this one.