Warning: Spoilers for Ready or Not ahead.
Family game night can be deadly — at least, if you're marrying into the Le Domas family. In Ready or Not, new bride Grace (Samara Weaving) faces the fight of her life when she discovers her new husband Alex's (Mark O'Brien) family want to murder her...via a not-so wholesome game of hide and seek. Though the hide and seek is very real, how and why the Le Domas family plays it this way is very not and extremely messed up.
The Le Domas' are exceedingly wealthy, having built their fortune in board games. Their success was no accident: An ancestor of theirs made a deal with a demon, allowing the family to thrive financially for generations. Since then, the clan has made the occasional goat sacrifice and performed other dark rituals in order to ensure not only their fortune, but their physical safety. If they don't do everything this demon wants, catastrophe will strike them, just as it has members of their extended family.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
On the night of the wedding, Grace is invited to the "Le Domas-only" room in the family mansion, where the walls are covered with various weapons and particularly unsettling artwork. She takes a seat at the family table, and is tasked with choosing a card from a mysterious box. The box is connected to that Le Domas family myth about a man who granted their ancestor great fortune. A price for such fortune is that each new member of the family must play a game, selected by the cursed box itself. Grace, therefore, is next in line to play this game of fate.
In keeping with tradition, Grace must play whatever game is on that card. The members of the family and their spouses sitting across from their new sister-in-law were lucky enough to draw cards like chess, or the card game Old Maid — and there was absolutely nothing sinister about it. Had Grace picked one of these games and completed them, her night would have gone quite differently, and those weapons on the walls would have remained there. Alex claims it is the only reason he agrees to marry her: The chances of the box picking "hide and seek" from all the game it contains was very rare.
Unfortunately for Grace, it happens. Now, the other family members have no choice but to kill Grace before dawn...or else meet an unknown, but terrible, fate.
There's no talking the Le Domas family out of killing Grace, as they've already gone through this ritual years before. Thirty years earlier, a groom was forced to play hide and seek...and lost. In the film's opening flashback, the sobbing groom, with arrows plunged into his chest, begs a young Daniel (played by hilarious, but sad Adam Brody as an adult) for help. Daniel hides Alex in a secret room to protect him from the sight, then calls out: "He's in here!"
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Later on in the movie, Grace finds the corpse of this poor groom, and figures out her own fate if she loses. Since there's no way out of this one, Grace fights her way through the night, having to contend with sinister butlers, dangerous dumbwaiters, and a mother-in-law who will do anything to protect her family from harm.
Despite putting up quite the fight, Grace is eventually caught. Though Daniel tries his best to rescue Grace from the ritual that the family needs to complete before dawn in order to stop the curse from commencing, Grace is eventually put on a table and prepared to be sacrificed. Unfortunately for the Le Domas clan, it's too late. As the ritual begins, the sun comes up.
The Le Domas family (including Alex) looks around the room, waiting for their fate. For a moment, that mysterious awful thing they were waiting for doesn't happen. They, and we, wonder if everything the Le Domas family has done — all that murder of humans and goats! — has been for nothing.
Just kidding! Moments later, each member of the Le Domas family spontaneously combusts, making it obvious that their fear of what would happen if they did not kill Grace was pretty justified.
"In-laws," Grace says when police officers ask what the hell happened the night of her wedding.
In-laws...and game nights.
Ready or Not is in theaters August 23, 2019.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT