Synopsis: After surviving one deadly game, Grace and her sister Faith must now outrun four rival families competing for a powerful throne – winner takes all.
Stars: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood, Kevin Durand, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, Daniel Beirne
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
Rated: R
Running Length: 108 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Lame-brained third act aside, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come matches the original’s blood-soaked energy with electric sister chemistry from Weaving and Newton. It’s a second-round sequel that’s well worth playing again.
Review:
The first Ready or Not was a late-summer surprise in 2019, a low-budget horror-comedy from Searchlight Pictures that arrived behind a trailer giving away too many of its best punches. It didn’t matter. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo known as Radio Silence, delivered a film so ferociously fun that audiences showed up in droves and kept coming back. Seven years and a couple of Scream sequels later, the directors have returned to the franchise that put them on the map. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is bigger, bloodier, and loaded with enough new toys to justify the trip back. If you loved the original, Ready or Not 2 comes bearing good news: the game is absolutely worth playing again.
Same Grace, New Handcuffs
The sequel picks up moments after the first film ended, which means Samara Weaving (Grace, Azrael) is still covered in blood, still in that dress, and still very much not okay. What she discovers is that surviving the Le Domas family ritual wasn’t the end of her nightmare but a promotion into a much larger one. A council of elite families from around the globe controls the game, and Grace has inadvertently become the prize in a new round of hide and seek. The stakes this time? Whoever catches her claims the High Seat, a position of supreme power. Four families want it. Grace wants to live.
Complicating things considerably is the arrival of Faith MacCaullay (Kathryn Newton, Griffin in Summer), Grace’s estranged younger sister. The two haven’t spoken in years, and the reunion happens at the worst possible moment: Faith is Grace’s emergency contact at the hospital, and within minutes, both sisters are marked for death and soon handcuffed together. It’s a brilliant structural choice.
Newton and Weaving have a combustible chemistry that makes the sibling friction land with real weight, even when the script cycles through one too many rounds of fight-reconcile-repeat. The dynamic recalls the best odd-couple survival pairings, and both actresses are so committed to each moment that the repetition barely registers in real time. For fans who remember both appearing in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, seeing them finally share real screen time together feels like a long-overdue payoff.
The Families That Hunt Together
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett expand the world without over-explaining it. Where the first film confined its chaos to a single mansion, the sequel tears across hospitals, luxury estates, a country club, and a golf course, filling each space with new threats and new opportunities for inventive mayhem. The lore gets filled in along the way rather than through heavy exposition dumps, which keeps the pacing sharp and the energy high.
The supporting cast is stacked. Sarah Michelle Gellar (Do Revenge) flips her scream queen legacy on its head as Ursula Danforth, the calculating daughter of aging patriarch Chester (David Cronenberg, The Fly). Gellar doesn’t need to raise her voice to be terrifying, and the film wisely lets her command scenes through presence alone. Shawn Hatosy (“The Pitt“) plays her volatile twin Titus with an unhinged physicality that makes every scene he’s in feel like something could snap at any second.
Horror fans will appreciate that Hatosy and Elijah Wood (The Monkey) are reunited here after co-starring in The Faculty over twenty-five years ago. Wood, as The Lawyer overseeing the ritual with detached amusement, is the connective tissue holding the chaos together, and he clearly relishes every second of it.
Nestor Carbonell (The Dark Knight) brings a self-obsessed flamboyance to Ignacio El Caído, Kevin Durand (Clown in a Cornfield) appears as the wired Bill Wilkinson, and Olivia Cheng and Varun Saranga (Fingernails) round out the rival families with contrasting styles that keep the ensemble from blurring together. Filmed in Canada, the smaller roles are filled by performers who bring an easy-going, wry charm to otherwise bonkers situations.
More Money, More Blood, More Fun
This sequel has been gifted significantly more resources than its predecessor and it shows. Returning cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz has a built-in visual language with the directors at this point, and the transition from the final frame of the original into the opening moments of the sequel is so visually seamless that it plays like deleted scenes from the first movie, even with the upgraded scale. Production designer Andrew Stearn expands from the gothic mansion of the original into spaces that signal power and danger at every turn, including a climactic temple built inside an abandoned church that Stearn designed as a literal inversion of sacred architecture.
Costume designer Avery Plewes, also returning, gets Grace back in that iconic wedding dress with a new tuxedo coat thrown over her shoulders that subtly reframes the look from victim to fighter. Newton’s Faith, meanwhile, wears a varsity jacket and double-denim combo that says everything about who she is before a single line of dialogue.
The practical effects deserve special mention. The franchise’s signature “paffing,” those sudden explosive full-body detonations, gets a massive upgrade courtesy of custom-built low-pressure air cannons capable of ejecting seven gallons of blood in a 360-degree spread. Across the production, approximately 250 gallons of stage blood were used. You feel it. While Brian Tyler‘s original themes carry over, composer Sven Faulconer keeps the new score spiky and propulsive, matching the film’s energy beat for beat.
Double or Nothing Pays Off
A lame-brained third act keeps this from reaching the ful-bore heights of the original. The script, again penned by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, builds such a strong foundation through two acts that when the finale overreaches, you feel the wobble. It doesn’t collapse, but it does leave you wishing the landing had been tighter.
That said, what works here works extremely well. After directing the Scream reboot and its sequel, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett opted out of returning for Scream 7 to follow up on the film that launched their careers. I think it was the right call. Between Abigail and this, they’ve proven they can reboot, reimagine, create, and continue within the genre with equal confidence.
Watching Newton and Weaving together is such a pleasure that you walk away hoping they find another project that fully capitalizes on their rapport. And as always, I left a Gellar performance wishing she was in more. With the recent news that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot pilot, filmed with Hamnet‘s Chloé Zhao directing, was ultimately not picked up, here’s hoping we get another Gellar genre turn sooner rather than later.
Clunky final third aside, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a highly entertaining sequel that matches the energy and ingenuity of its predecessor. Weaving proves once again she’s up for anything, Newton matches her step for step, and the whole thing moves with the kind of reckless, blood-soaked joy that makes you want to play the game all over again.
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