Ready or Not 2: Here I Come - Let the Infernal Games Begin!... um, Again!
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B
Samara Weaving didn’t so much survive the horror of Ready or Not as crawl out of it—bloodied, stabbed, shot, and newly widowed—only to discover that marrying into a murderous family isn’t so much a mistake as a franchise opportunity.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come wastes no time reminding us of this. Grace (Weaving), barely patched together from her first outing, is promptly arrested for arson and a body count that would be difficult to explain even with visual aids.
Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
“Satanic in-laws forced me into a deadly game of hide-and-seek,” is, it turns out, not a courtroom-friendly defence. Especially the part where they explode at dawn.
If the first film was a tightly wound survival horror with a sense of humour, the sequel broadens the canvas—and significantly increases the body count. Grace is joined this time by her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), whose arrival introduces backup, baggage, and a long list of unresolved issues.
The film mines their shared history—abandonment, resentment, and competitive emotional damage—for tension, resulting in a kind of sibling rivalry where the bickering is light, but the consequences are not.
The new antagonists—an international mix of murderers and their equally ambitious offspring arrive to succeed where the Domas family failed. Each represents a branch of the obscenely wealthy and casually homicidal. Think mansion murder mystery, minus the mystery.
Everyone is playing to win, and winning requires a fair amount of attempted murder before breakfast. Borrowing from The Most Dangerous Game and The Hunt (2020), the film adds sibling rivalry—like a family picnic where the three-legged race ends in casualties.
At the centre of this particular nest of vipers is Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg), a bedridden, all-seeing patriarch who looks like he’s running the apocalypse from a dialysis machine. His children—played with icy, competitive relish by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy (Dr. Jack Abbot to The Pitt fans) circle the prize with the kind of barely concealed hostility that suggests they’ve been rehearsing each other’s eulogies for years.
And then there’s the lawyer, Elijah Wood, quietly hovering in the background like an adjudicator at a very expensive and very lethal poker game. He doesn’t so much participate as observe, which somehow makes him more unsettling. When the stakes are life and death, neutrality feels like its own kind of menace.
There are rules. Grace must die before dawn. The winner claims ultimate power. And no one can kill a competing family member, even by accident, without triggering a full bloodline explosion. Clear enough, though the film becomes increasingly burdened by its own rulebook, as if the chaos needs supervision.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett return, splitting the film between two competing energies. On one side, there are the chamber pieces: interior sequences steeped in gothic tension, where conversations are edged with panic, threat and exposition. Indoors, the film shifts into chamber comedy, with characters watching events unfold on monitors and reacting in exaggerated bursts—an overexcitable Greek chorus narrating the carnage.
On the other hand, the film periodically erupts into full-throttle chaos—action sequences that feel less staged than unleashed. Here, subtlety is abandoned entirely in favour of velocity and volume. Bodies move faster, weapons get louder, and the film leans into a kind of gleeful excess that borders on self-dare: how far can we push this before it collapses?
For a while, that duality works. The contrast between whispered menace and explosive violence gives the film a rhythm—inhale, exhale, reload. But as it stretches on, the balance begins to wobble. The interior scenes lose their purpose, and the action, in trying to outdo itself, starts to feel like escalation for its own sake.
Tonally, the film leans harder into comedy this time, and for the most part, it works. The performances are pitched at exactly the right frequency with everyone fully committed to the film’s ridiculous premise without tipping into parody. Weaving, in particular, continues to excel at the art of the one-word response: a mix of exhaustion, disbelief, and “I cannot believe this is happening again.”
Where the film stumbles is in its excess. It runs long, and not in the satisfying, “we’re building toward something” way, but in the “we’re not entirely sure when to stop” sense. The final act piles on chaos with increasing urgency, as though worried the audience might escape before everyone gets their moment to either kill or be killed. The result is a finale that feels rushed and overstuffed—less a conclusion than a cinematic shrug followed by a bloodbath.
There’s also the question—raised but never quite answered—of why anyone would willingly sign up for eternal damnation in exchange for earthly power. The film gestures at it, jokes about it, but ultimately seems just as baffled as we are. Then again, maybe that’s the point. Greed rarely comes with a long-term plan.
Still, for all its overreach, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come remains an entertainingly vicious satire. When it hits, it hits sharply. When it misses, it does so loudly, but never without conviction.
It’s messy. It’s excessive. It overstays its welcome.
But like any good dysfunctional family gathering, you don’t leave early.
Not when things are just starting to get interesting.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and stars Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opens in select theatres beginning Friday, March 20, 2026.