Here I Come Hates the Ultra-Rich So, So Much

The biggest question ahead of the SXSW world premiere of Ready Or Not: Here I Come, the sequel to the 2019 horror-comedy hit Ready Or Not, was whether or not the sequel could live up to the smash success of the first one. The late summer phenomenon — in which a bride discovers on her wedding night that she must participate in a terrifying game where her husband’s wealthy family tries to hunt her down and kill her before dawn — racked up $57.6 million worldwide off a $6 million budget. But how in the world would directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett continue what seemed to be a standalone story with a definite ending? (Spoiler alert for the first film: against all odds, the final girl lives and all of her in-laws explode into bloody pulp.)

The answer? They double down. The sequel throws the bride, Grace, played with feral ferocity by Samara Weaving into another, even more twisted game. There’s more gore, more gruesome ways to die, more hailing of Satan, and even more rich people. It’s like The Hunger Games if you made Katniss into two innocent women from foster families (yes, there are two this time), and turned everyone in the Epstein Files into their hunters. Some critics I know were disappointed, but judging from the SXSW crowd’s roaring approval at every frame, the sequel is pretty much a guaranteed hit when it opens in theaters on March 20.

This one starts out as the first one ends, with a bruised and blood-soaked Grace sitting on the stone steps of a burning and exploding Connecticut mansion, trying to light a cigarette. At the hospital, we’re introduced to her estranged younger sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), whom Grace forgot to remove as her emergency contact. Their back-and-forth insults establish them as siblings who are hurt but clearly still love each. But the real action is happening among the world’s secret ruling families, who’ve just been alerted that the Le Domas clan failed in their sacrifice, cracking open a new game in which they all must race to finish the job to gain the High Seat from which they can control the world.

A clear highlight for the SXSW crowd was the sight of legendary horror director David Cronenberg onscreen. He plays the bed-ridden patriarch of the ruling Danforth family in Newport, Rhode Island, and the head of a cult of rich people under the control of “Mr. Le Bail” (a ghostlike apparition who appears in a chair when Grace vanquishes the Le Domas family). The moment he barks into a phone, “Approve the ceasefire,” a chiron appears on the screens of three news monitors: “BREAKING NEWS: CEASEFIRE APPROVED.” (It got a big laugh.)

We’re then taken around the world, to Shanghai, Madrid, and Atlantic City, as the ruling families of the world learn that they might get a chance to compete for total dominance for the first time since 1963. The problem for Grace, and now Faith, is that the game must now be repeated. They find themselves bound and gagged at the Danforths’ opulent estate, where they learn that the clock on their mortal existence has just been reset. The head of each family joins the game and whoever can hunt down the errant bride and kill her first gets to rule the world. Oh, and they’ve handcuffed Faith to Grace to slow her down a little. Can they stop their family feuding long enough to work together and save each other’s lives?

There are a bunch of new faces, many of whom you’ll recognize. The rules of the game state that, if a head of a household falls, the next person in succession must take their place and fight, or their entire family line will get blown up by Satan. The same goes for anyone whose family member violates a rule of the game. Nestor Carbonell of Lost is the head of the Spanish family, who also happens to be a terrible shot. And then there are the big guns. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy (Dr. Jack Abbott on The Pitt) bring a convincing haughtiness to the Danforth twins — a pair whose family had the High Seat but now must compete to win it again because of a weird quirk of their giant parchment rulebook and this stupid bride.

“We spent a lot of time discussing who these characters were and how they are the antithesis of the other sibling relationship [between Grace and Faith],” Gellar said at SXSW. “And as their relationship gets closer, our tethers get broken.”

And Elijah Wood provides a cheeky, bemused-insider vibe as the Danforths’ lawyer, who’s overseeing the technicalities and generally hiding behind a lectern when contestants start exploding. “He’s a bit of an enigma, a mystery, and we talked a lot about him on set, like, ‘How long has he been doing this? Has it been centuries?’” Wood said in the Q&A. (They also landed on the idea — never shown onscreen — that the lawyer has weird sex.)

In the Q&A, the directors and cast explained that most of the effects were done practically, and that the cast did nearly all of their own stunts. This required many of them to get shot with a “blood cannon,” which the directors didn’t want to rehearse too much, lest they miss the reaction on each actor’s face when they finally got their chance to be covered in goo and guts.

Everyone onstage agreed that their role in the film was really to support Weaving, but they’d also been intrigued by the messages of the movie. “We talked about how there’s lots of idiots in the world that have a lot of power, that have children. I can think of a few of them,” said Hotosey.

Maybe the closest thing the movie has to a thesis comes when one of the contestants flies a drone to the sisters and tries to offer a compromise via a loophole in the rules that could spare all of them, if Grace is willing to make a repugnant sacrifice. “There are no good guys or bad guys. There’s just the system,” says the contestant. Fittingly, the drone gets pulverized, the wheeling-and-dealing contestant gets exploded, and the system, well, it never stood a chance.