Ready or Not (2019)

Why do these screams matter?

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (2019) is a foray into generational lore and unrestrained privilege that offers up an intriguing blend of campy gore and pointed social commentary. The film opens with a traditional wedding between Grace (Samara Weaving) and Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) that signals Alex’s status as heir to a wealthy gaming dynasty. That evening, Grace is told that it is a family custom for all people marrying into the family to play a game. Grace, whose own history as a foster kid makes her yearn for a family of her own, is eager to participate in the family ritual. But when she pulls the one game card that means the family must kill her or risk breaking its pact with the Devil, a pact that has resulted in the family’s vast economic fortunes, Grace’s only hope is to survive an evening of deadly hide or seek until daybreak when the pact will be broken.

Noted for its “portrait of fumbling arrogance and curdled privilege,” the film reflects the class divide pundits noted impacted the 2016 election (Sims). According to Pew Research Center, people were overwhelmingly less likely to vote in 2016 if their annual family income was under $30,000; a trend that has not changed in subsequent elections. (“An Examination of the 2016 Electorate”; Malter).  Researchers attribute this lack of participation to economically disadvantaged people already not feeling as though they are part of the political process and restrictive voting practices that make it difficult for people to navigate around work schedules or secure transportation (Fulwood III). As an untapped “sleeping giant” voter bloc, low-income voters have the potential to significantly alter elections if they can become mobilized (Anderson).

But who would these disenfranchised voters support? While political pundits have long suggested that voters without a college degree increasingly vote Republican, the data is far more complicated. A recent PEW Research Center report looking at partisanship and voting reveals that “While voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree tilt Republican overall, this differs across income groups. Among voters without a college degree, those who are in the lower or lower-middle tiers of family incomes are more likely than those in the middle- and higher-income groups to associate with the Democratic Party” (“Changing Partisan” 42). Grace’s scream- which reads as a renunciation of both major political parties and echoes the trend of lower income Americans opting not to vote- ultimately asks the audience to consider what happens when marginalized people stop participating in a system stacked against them. In many respects, Ready or Not considers how power structures could shift if the economically marginalized resisted the demands of a capitalist oligarchy.

Our first scream set comes after Grace has realized the gravity of her situation. She is left stunned when Alex explains that while he knew Grace’s pulling the death card was a possibility, it was a risk he was willing to take because he could not accept letting her go. As she attempts to escape the Dumas house, she is met with indifference by a group of kids on a joyride.

 

The screams Grace unleashes are unabashedly political and function as a direct renunciation of a class system that privileges the needs of those with money (Alex) over those without (Grace). Alex’s confession reveals that he sees Grace less as a person and more as a possession. Her needs become secondary to Alex’s desires; she is simply a player in the performance of domesticity Alex has constructed for himself. This failure to see Grace as a person with her own unique thoughts and needs pervades rhetoric about low-income individuals and families. Terms such as “welfare queen” and “section 8” have complicated histories- often underpinned with racism, sexism, and xenophobia- of being deployed to stigmatize low income people to the point they become dehumanized (Lopez; Badger). When Alex decides to put Grace’s life at risk without her consent, he is reflecting a similar dismissal of her needs in favor of his own. Even worse, his wealth and privileged upbringing means he has no frame of reference to understand why his behavior is so problematic. He still sees her as the waitress without a family whom he believed needed saving.

Beyond that, these screams usher in a moment of metamorphosis for Grace. The profanity that couches her screams belies her rejection of the artifice foisted upon her by her wealthy in-laws and suggests a return to her authentic self. Having vocally rejected the power structures that surround her, Grace’s appearance begins to reflect a deliberate unraveling of some of the gender constructions we’ve seen in the character up until this point. From the picture-perfect, virginal white wedding dress that becomes increasingly bloodied and shredded to the sneakers that take the place of heels, Grace’s wardrobe shifts to convey her transformation from someone willing to perform a role to be accepted by her husband’s family to someone who realizes her own innate value and strength. She becomes the embodiment-physically and emotionally-of resistance to a system that has always been weighted toward the wealthy.

Grace is driven to scream precisely because she has no other avenue available to her to make herself heard. Having injured herself in her flight from the Dumas home, Grace flags down a car filled with adolescent males who she believes will help her. ​​But their easy dismissal of her pain and very obvious need for help are yet another reminder to Grace, and the audience, that her survival is entirely up to her. An addendum to her scream, Grace’s phrasing of “fucking rich people” reflects a sentiment similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous quotation “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” The latter was said during the French Revolution to describe class conflict. Similarly, Grace’s riff on Rousseau’s words underscore that Grace isn’t only expressing indignation at her personal plight but that she is also angry at a capitalistic structure that renders some people expendable. It indicates Grace’s burgeoning understanding that in the eyes of the wealthy, she will forever be seen as disposable. While the divide between wealth and low-income is suggested in the start of the film, Grace’s scream takes that suggestion and names it explicitly for the audience. The result is an understanding that Grace isn’t only fleeing from one family; she’s running from the hierarchical system of wealth and all of the connections and privileges that connotes.

In our second scream, Grace enters into her most physical battle when she faces off against ​​her mother-in-law, Becky (Andie MacDowell). Previous scenes established that Becky came from a similarly disenfranchised background as Grace. But all offers of familial love are taken off the table when Becky tells Grace it’s either her or them.

 

Here, Becky’s scream takes center stage as she rushes toward Grace with the intent to kill her. For Becky, this kill is more personal than it is for the others. We know Becky sees her former self in Grace and her decision to kill Grace through hand-to-hand combat as opposed to using a weapon that offers some distance suggests that what Becky desires is to destroy the former version of herself- the version that existed before she accumulated wealth and power. If Becky must destroy another woman to do so, then so be it. The moment suggests that no inherent bond exists between women, especially when one woman is financially privileged, and the other is not.

Becky’s scream in this exchange is wielded as a weapon. Because she knows that Grace’s one desire is to be part of a family, her words- “You don’t deserve a family”- when couched in the timbre of a scream are meant to be as emotionally damaging to Grace as Becky’s punches are physically damaging. And yet, Becky’s words have the exact opposite effect by motivating Grace to fight back. Grace’s response scream- “Fuck you and your fucking family”- suggests that while Becky’s words have cut Grace to the core, they have also crystallized her understanding that she alone is responsible for her survival. That these screams contain articulations is also important for showing that Grace is coming to a kind of consciousness about how the stories she has been taught that being a part of a family will make her whole are steeped in the patriarchal idea that women must be an extension of a familial dynamic to have worth. Her response to Becky then becomes a scream of protest: it is Grace’s first explicit rejection of the traditional family unit which Grace has been taught is more desirable than her own upbringing.

With that in mind, our final scream demonstrates Grace’s complete rejection of the domestic ideals with which she has been raised. In this scene, Alex betrays Grace by joining his family in an attempt to sacrifice her to keep the family’s pact with the Devil intact. But his stab wound to her heart misses just as dawn breaks.

 

Akin to the sound of a trapped animal, this scream represents Grace’s instinctual desire to fight back. By picking up the knife and brandishing it against those she earlier yearned to have as her family, Grace is essentially rejecting the idea that she is not enough on her own. Her scream is a primal one and with it comes a complete rejection of the traditional domesticity represented by her relationship with Alex. In an era where reports claim President Trump prefers women who work for him dress in a feminine manner and where Vice President Pence fears being alone with a woman who is not his wife, even in a professional capacity, this rejection is pointed (Fortin; Waldman). Our final glimpse of Grace is as she sits on the steps, bloodied and battered, and smoking a cigarette while everything burns around her. In the end, she’s the last one standing not because she trusted others to take care of her- within traditional and normative family structures- but because she took care of herself.

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Works Cited

“An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters.” Pew Research Center, 9 Aug. 2016.

Anderson, Sarah. “Waking the Sleeping Giant of the Low-Income Voting Bloc.” Inequality.org, 6 Feb. 2024.

Badger, Emily. “How Section 8 became a racial slur.” The Washington Post, 15 June 2015.

“Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation.” Pew Research Center, April, 2024.

Fortin, Jacey. “Dress Like a Woman? What Does that Mean?.” The New York Times, 3 Feb. 2017.

Fulwood III, Sam. “Why Young, Minority, and Low-Income Citizens Don’t Vote.” The Center for American Progress, 6 Nov. 2014.

Lopez, Allie R. “When Southern Segregationists Gave Black Residents One-Way Bus Tickets North.” Time Magazine, 21 March 2024.

Malter, Jordan. “Why poor people still aren’t voting.” CNN, 5 Aug. 2015.

Ready or Not. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, performances by Samara Weaving, Andie MacDowell, and Henry Czerny, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019.

Sims, David. “Ready or Not Is a Clever Horror Comedy About Entitled Rich People.” The Atlantic, 22 Aug. 2019.

Waldman, Paul. “Opinion: Pence’s unwillingness to be alone with a woman is a symptom of a bigger problem.” The Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2017.