Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett Screenplay: Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy Cast: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood Year: 2026
I took my time getting to this one, out of pure scepticism. "Ready or Not" worked as a closed piece: one night, one house, one rule, and an ending that left nothing dangling. I couldn't see where a sequel would come from that wasn't an attempt to squeeze the first film's success, so I arrived with no expectations. I can't say it exceeded them, because I barely had any, but it did surprise me, and I enjoyed it considerably more than I expected to. Worth saying early, though: like the first, this is a film you shouldn't overthink, and you'll do better switching your brain off and taking it for what it is.
"Ready or Not: Here I Come" starts exactly where the first one ends, with Grace (Samara Weaving) walking out of the mansion belonging to the family she nearly married into and managed to escape. The police arrive, the ambulance arrives, she's taken to hospital, and there we learn the game didn't end where we thought. That family belonged to a larger group of families, and their disappearance leaves a leadership seat vacant within that group. The condition for claiming it is killing the person who wiped out the previous family, which is to say Grace. The game restarts, now with several families after her, and she knows it from the outset. Shortly before the hunt begins, her sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) turns up at the hospital, having been listed as her emergency contact, and gets pulled into the situation despite not being the target.
The relationship between the sisters gives the film its emotional floor, and it's the best decision in Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy's script. They don't get along, but there's real affection underneath: what separated them was a specific problem they never resolved, and the film opens it up gradually while the situation forces them to depend on each other. The chemistry between Weaving and Newton feels genuine rather than manufactured, and the script is careful to treat them both as leads instead of letting one displace the other. It's the same move the first film made with Grace's marriage and her husband's family: the family drama isn't decoration, it's there so the protagonist has something holding her up when she starts hitting back.
It's worth being clear about genre, because the film presents as horror and isn't quite that. What's here is action with exaggerated violence and spectacular deaths, plus the satanic-cult framework holding the whole thing together, and those two elements are the only part you can properly call horror. The rest plays as action comedy, exactly like the first. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett still understand that excessive violence and the joke have to arrive together for neither to become uncomfortable, and most of the time they pull it off. Unlike the first, this one isn't confined to a single location, though the bulk of the action still ends up in a mansion.
Where it fails is the comedy, which is odd, because comedy is also what it does best. Some moments simply aren't funny and land more awkward than amusing, and a couple of characters are tonally wrong altogether: they get pushed to be funnier than the material can support, and the result is secondhand embarrassment. They don't ruin the film, but the drop in quality is noticeable every time they appear. Outside those stretches the comedy works well and knows when to stop.
The cast holds two pleasant surprises. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elijah Wood ("Come to Daddy") turn up in roles you don't expect to find in this kind of film, and both settle into the tone effortlessly. But the centre remains Samara Weaving, and this film finishes installing her as one of the most important actresses in the genre. She had already been building in this direction, including "Guns Akimbo", and the two "Ready or Not" films are unquestionably the best-known work of her career. Kathryn Newton, who covered similar ground in "Freaky", matches her pace in every scene.
The obligatory question is how it compares with the first. You always walk into a sequel ready to declare it inferior, and in this case I can't: they're level. The fun, the volume of violence and the dose of horror all sit at the same level, and the only thing I can hold against it is that overused comedy in a couple of stretches. Anyone who enjoyed the first will find exactly what they came for, with the bonus of a sibling relationship that gives it a little more substance. Anyone after real horror, with sustained tension and scares, picked the wrong film, and had already picked wrong with the first. This is bloody action with jokes, made by people who know how.
Rating: 8/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The ending is direct and hides no great ambiguity. Grace wins the game and ends up the cult's leader, and how she gets there is the only part with any real cleverness to it.
The family that accumulates the most screen time across the film is a pair of siblings, and they're the ones who finally capture her. That's where Grace finds the crack in the rulebook. The requirement for a family to claim the leadership seat is to kill her, but there's an alternative route: if she marries one of the contestants, that contestant acquires the position of power without needing to kill her. Grace proposes marriage to the brother and the wedding goes ahead. What she already knew, and they failed to account for, is that the rulebook forbids killing another contestant in the game but says nothing about killing a family member. Once married, the man becomes family, and Grace kills him. That leaves her the sole heir to the leadership, and she receives the ring that confers the position.
And then she gives it up. Grace throws the ring into a pit the cult members had dug themselves. Since the rule states that whoever holds the ring at dawn becomes leader, everyone present dives into the pit after it, and in the process they start fighting and killing each other to get hold of it. Dawn breaks with nobody holding it. And by the same rule of the game they wrote themselves, all of them die. That lets Grace and Faith walk out and survive the hunt.
It's a close that stays consistent with what the first film established: the cult isn't defeated by force but by its own rulebook, and Grace wins because she is the only person taking the rules literally while everyone else treats them as tradition. The reading is the one that carried the original, that these families are so bound to their ritual that the ritual becomes the weapon. There isn't much more to unpack, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise.
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