I believe that in the minds of millions of people, a sacred and romantic wedding must be associated with happiness and fulfillment afterwards. “Ready or Not” breaks this established imagination by giving everyone a big surprise in the setting first. Most of this year’s summer blockbusters are collectively weak, and the latest small budget cult film has received high marks from both professional and audience ratings. Those of you who have seen the trailer must be as curious as I was about the setting of the film, which is Ready or Not.

The trailer opens with the story of the heroine marrying into a wealthy, eccentric family that started with card games. When the marriage partner has to join the family, it’s not just as simple as having a wedding, but playing a life and death card game to be considered an official daughter-in-law. Believing that in the minds of millions of people, a sacred and romantic wedding must be associated with happiness and fulfillment afterwards, Ready or Not breaks this established imagination by giving everyone a big surprise in the setting first and foremost. It is also reminiscent of Silent Land, Blindfolded and earlier films such as Escape from Tortola, which also attracted attention with their settings.

In this genre, after setting up a set game, the protagonist starts to be forced to defend himself, which leads to an exciting and thrilling escape journey. The two directors of ‘Ready or Not’, who previously directed the poorly rated ‘The Devil’s Due Date’, also had a ‘bloodbath’ caused by a wedding, and it seems that both directors have a very strong shadow over marriage. Perhaps having gained a lot of experience from their first collaboration, ‘Ready or Not’ has been greatly improved in its execution and uses absurdity to round off many of the holes in the characters’ motivations and story logic, although not quite advanced, the narrative flow is clear and precise.

It’s time for a spoiler analysis, as we analyse how the heroine escapes and see how much more of the film’s underlying meaning we can dig out. The film begins 30 years ago with a frightening night of a bloody wedding where a backwards son-in-law, killed by an arrow, unlocks the secrets of a powerful family. Turning 30 years later, the heroine, Grace, marries Alex and has a private wedding at the castle mansion, but from the conversations the family members have with Grace, we get the impression that everyone is preoccupied, even Alex who wants to take Grace and elope. Towards midnight, Grace is told that according to family tradition, she has to participate in a card drawing ceremony and play a game from the cards drawn in order to be rightfully considered a member of the card game’s powerful family.

When Grace drew the ‘hide and seek’ card, everyone’s expressions became more serious. They played a spooky “Hide and Seek” song and told Grace to hide while they were each assigned a weapon, from the most primitive axe to a compact pistol, as the family members prepared to hunt Grace. Grace, who up until now had thought it was just a strange family ritual game, was saved by Alex just as she was about to abandon the game and come out. And just then a nanny is accidentally killed by a member of the family, and it is revealed to Grace that this is not a simple game of hide-and-seek, but that she has drawn a death card.

So the superstitious family have to find a way to kill Grace before dawn to sacrifice her according to family rules, but the funny thing about the film is that the family are all rookies at hunting, resulting in a lot of darkly humorous and funny sequences. And there are parts of the family that don’t want the hunt to happen, such as one of the fat son-in-laws, who plays the sauce during the hunt and instead hides himself, trying to get the others to end the death game as quickly as possible.

Then there is Alex’s mother, who loves Grace but is forced to stand against her because she believes so strongly in the family contract ritual. And then there is Alex’s brother Daniel, who is also a close friend of Grace’s, who is also very much in the middle of this hunting ritual. Alex, the groomsman, chooses to side with Grace and secretly helps her escape, but the two are outnumbered against the odds and Alex is quickly brought under control.

Grace is then brought back from the dead, and when she does, she is threatened with death several times. The film ends with an anti-climactic ending that is somewhat surprising. If you’re not afraid of spoilers, you can read on. It turns out that when the Cards made their fortune, they had a deal with the devil, they had to give him a sacrifice at the right time to ensure that the family would be safe and wealthy, and the devil must choose the sacrifice from among the newest members of the family, and this time it happens to be Grace.

So they had to take Grace and sacrifice her before dawn or the whole family would die and the house would burn to ashes in a great fire. This consequence sounds so absurd that even some in the family dismiss this superstition. It turns out that at the end of the film dawn breaks and no one dies, as if this were just an ironic superstition.

But then the tables turn and the oldest grandmother’s body suddenly bursts, followed by Alex’s dad and sister, every member of the family, literally fulfilling that horrible demonic pact that the whole family dies as long as the bride is not sacrificed. Originally, I thought the film was the same story we’ve seen before where the protagonist lives to die and eventually awakens and kills back, and Grace must turn into a warrior later on and wipe out the psychopathic family in one fell swoop. Instead, the film uses the setting of a real demon to reverse the original family’s insanity about superstition.

Some will find this ending to the film stunning, but others will think it undermines the power of the heroine. As I watched the second half, I was also waiting for the heroine’s Jedi comeback, but I was somewhat sorry to see that what really kept the heroine alive at the end was not entirely on her own merits.

But this anti-climactic ending really makes the film shine. It’s worth noting that the film has several details done right, such as Grace, at the end, asking Alex for a divorce and taking the ring off. Perhaps if Grace hadn’t done this, she would have ended up exploding along with Alex, as Grace was already married to Alex, which also shows that Grace is considered part of the gentry family, and since the sacrifice failed and the devil was going to take out the family, Grace would have been one of them.

Also when Grace escaped to the sheep pen, it actually showed then that the family was in a cult and believed in Satan. The goats in the pen were all goats, and in the West there is a demon called Baphomet, which is one of the synonyms for Satan, and the goat-headed man is also the appearance of that demon, and this cult is marked by the goat-headed pentagram, which is a branch of Satanism. The reason they keep the goats is for regular sacrifice, so when Grace falls into the basement, in addition to finding a human corpse from 30 years ago, there are many goat carcasses. Also Ready or Not wraps up some satire on marriage. Grace and Alex’s wedding, for example, starts off romantically but is actually already in deep crisis, suggesting that the same is true of most marriages, which appear to be calm and even happy on the surface, but the two have reached the edge of a cliff.

In the end, Alex holds onto Grace instead to keep her from leaving, and ironically, in a marriage in crisis, when two people who once loved each other are no longer in love, it is each other who hurts them the most. Apart from this, the film also hints vaguely at topics such as mystery cults, class metaphors and feminist consciousness, but doesn’t bother to dig deeper, so Ready or Not presents nothing more than a well-done, cool film. The political metaphors and racial issues are much more profound than in “Escape from Desperado”.

If you like a lot of violence and gore, and if you like weird and magical cult settings, Ready or Not will give you a lot of satisfaction as a cool film, and it is also entertaining and not too serious a thriller.