Ready Or Not review: Downton meets devil worship in a bloody good horror comedy

Dirs: Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin. Cast: Samara Weaving, Mark O'Brien, Adam Brody, Andie MacDowell, Henry Czerny, Nicky Guadagni. 18 cert, 95 mins

Marrying into an insane family is the most reliable motor ever devised for Gothic drama. With just a malevolent twist of the knife, it spawns a cracking, Gothic-flavoured horror comedy in Ready or Not. Families don't come much weirder than the Le Domas clan, scions of a wildly successful boardgame empire who are about to admit their latest member. And then dismember her.

Grace (Samara Weaving) begins the film as a nervous bride preparing for her wedding in the gardens of the forbidding family manse. The reason for her nerves is just uncertainty in the face of this long-accrued privilege – although she loves Alex (Mark O’Brien), the reception from his siblings and parents has been variously frosty, drunkenly inappropriate, or openly hostile in the case of Helene (Nicky Guadagni), a hilariously hatchet-faced spinster aunt.

She is nowhere near through the worst of it yet. An age-old family tradition demands that a game be played at midnight, requiring Grace to draw a card from an antique box and read it out. “Hide and Seek” is her allotted fate – merely a bizarre one, until she realises that the entire family have grabbed weaponry off the walls, and must kill her before dawn to perform some kind of blood ritual.

The superficial politesse of these in-laws, headed by Henry Czerny’s genteel patriarch, only lasts until the count to 100 is done. They storm the corridors with crossbows, axes and ornamental guns aloft – save for Alex, who slips their clutches to help Grace survive.

The layered fun of the film is how the whole dynasty, husband included, are complicit to varying degrees in the horror of their bloodline: some through marrying into it, some by being born, as it were, with a gore-encrusted silver spoon in their mouth. After Get Out, with Succession on TV, and with Rian Johnson's Christie-esque whodunit Knives Out looming, we’re living through a pointed moment for inherited wealth spelling psychosis on screen: if they ever did a second Downton Abbey film, it might be time for the entire Crawley tribe to be outed as devil-worshippers.

Despite the devious intrusion of subtext that’s barely even sub, there’s nothing getting in the way of pure, outré enjoyment here. The writing-directing team tip their hat to Rosemary’s Baby – the ultimate marriage-as-a-mistake film – and have, in Weaving’s character, a way-better-than-average horror heroine.

Grace, earmarked as a sacrificial lamb, is far too caustic and self-reliant to be anyone’s screaming damsel, and soon she’s turning the tables on her loaded enemies with wit and spite. It’s a star-making turn for Weaving, something of a dead ringer for her fellow Australian Margot Robbie, but grabbing our engagement with a spiky comic timing all her own.

As her lacy bridal dress gets ever more spattered, the film could go for broke in the way of these things, but it keeps a refreshingly solid hold on tone and character. Andie MacDowell is very nicely used as a southern mother-in-law, sympathetic at first, who knuckles down to business when she must: she’s looking better at 61 than she ever has, and acting better, too.

Czerny, always alert, loses his rag in a couple of choice tantrums that blister the roof off. And Adam Brody, as Alex’s depressed alcoholic of a brother, reminds you what an underexploited actor he is: his scenes have a shrugging, apologetic, weaselly quality that suits him down to the ground. Juggling the madness neatly to the end, the filmmakers lay on an especially witty dénouement – two, really – which brings the whole thing to land with a satisfying snap. It’s not pretty, but it’s bloody good fun.

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