Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
by Kathia Woods
Let's be clear about one thing from the jump: nobody asked for a Ready or Not sequel. The 2019 original was a perfectly sealed, blood-soaked, one-night fever dream — the kind
of movie that ends so definitively, with bodies exploding and a bride lighting a cigarette in the ruins of her new family's empire, that a follow-up felt not just unnecessary but structurally impossible. So here's the thing about Ready or Not 2: Here I Come— it shouldn't work. And yet, for most of its gleefully unhinged 108 minutes, it kind of does.
Radio Silence directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett pick up exactly where they left off — no time jump, no graceful segue. Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) wakes up handcuffed to a hospital bed, her wedding dress still drenched in Le Domas family blood, with a detective informing her that the legal situation is, to put it mildly, complicated. Into this chaos arrives Faith (Kathryn Newton), Grace's estranged younger sister and her listed emergency contact — which is the film's shorthand for: these two haven't spoken in seven years, and they're about to be thrown together into a new nightmare before they've even had a chance to process the last one.
The mythology expands in ways that are both entertaining and a little breathless. Before Grace can explain herself, she and Faith are snatched by the Council — a shadowy consortium of four rival elite families, each willing to kill to claim the ultimate high seat of global power. Grace must survive until dawn to claim it herself. It is, as Elijah Wood's silkily sinister Lawyer explains with barely concealed delight, "double or nothing." The game is on, again.
The smartest move the filmmakers make is centering the emotional engine of the film not on Grace's survival instincts — we already know she has those in spades — but on the fractured dynamic between the two sisters. Faith is guarded, resentful, carrying seven years of abandonment like armor. Grace is chaotic, impulsive, and quietly devastated by the distance between them. Newton grounds every scene she's in with a raw authenticity that keeps the film from floating entirely into camp. She is, as one reviewer put it, the more grounded of the two leads, and her steadiness gives Weaving's operatic physicality something to push against. Together, they generate real heat.
That said, the sisterly arguments do occasionally bring the film's momentum to a grinding halt. There are moments where the screenplay, by returning writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, leans too hard into the emotional backstory when the audience is clearly itching to get back to the carnage. It's a genuine attempt at depth, and it's appreciated — but the calibration isn't always right.
Weaving, for her part, remains an absolute force. This is a performance built on pure physical commitment and wicked comic timing. She runs, bleeds, screams, and schemes with equal ferocity, and she carries the film's manic energy the way a relay runner carries a baton — constantly, deliberately, never dropping it. Whether she's navigating a compound full of assassins in a ruined wedding dress or trading barbs with the film's parade of colorful villains, she commands the frame completely.
The expanded cast of antagonists is a gift. Elijah Wood, reuniting with The Faculty co-star Shawn Hatosy in what amounts to a lovely little horror fan service moment, is the undisputed MVP of the film as The Lawyer — a man who weaponizes procedural calm the way others use a firearm. He is impeccably strange and deeply funny, and his scenes with Weaving are some of the best in the movie. Kevin Durand arrives as a cocaine-addled Satanist dripping with chaotic menace, and while his exit comes earlier than expected — courtesy of a very on-brand Radio Silence body-explosion gag — he makes every second count.
Sarah Michelle Gellar brings a particular charge to her scenes, made all the richer by a costume detail that becomes one of the film's most delightful Easter eggs: Kathryn Newton's Faith wears an outfit that's a subtle recreation of Buffy Summers' look from "Welcome to the Hellmouth." Gellar reportedly didn't catch on immediately — which only made the moment more charming when she did. It's the kind of genre-loving detail that the film sprinkles throughout, rewarding the attentive viewer without winking so hard it breaks the fourth wall.
David Cronenberg appears in the film's opening stretch, lending his singular presence to the Council mythology — though his exit is frustratingly swift for anyone hoping for an extended dose of the horror legend's on-screen magnetism. A little Cronenberg goes a long way, the film seems to decide. Whether you agree is a matter of personal taste, but this critic wanted more.
Visually, cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz — returning from his work on Scream — opens up the palette considerably from the amber-drenched interiors of the original. The sequel moves through lush green exteriors, a wood-paneled secret library, a gloomy ritual chamber, and — in the film's single funniest set piece — a gleaming wedding reception hall where two women, temporarily blinded by pepper spray, flail and swing at each other in pure slapstick perfection. It's the kind of sequence that reminds you that Radio Silence, at their best, are genuinely gifted comedic action directors.
The film's class commentary is sharper and more openly satirical than the first. Where Ready or Not used the Le Domas family to skewer inherited wealth and the absurd violence of upper-class tradition, the sequel zooms out to indict the entire architecture of elite power — the idea that behind every institution, every "legitimate" seat of authority, there are families who believe their dominion is cosmically ordained and worth any body count. It's nastier in its implications, even if it rarely pauses long enough to let them fully land. The satire is more a seasoning than a main course here, which is both a stylistic choice and a small missed opportunity.
Where the film stumbles most noticeably is in its pacing and tonal consistency. Because the action is relentless almost from the opening frame, the escalation that made the first film so effective — the slow build, the mounting dread, the moment when you realize exactly how trapped Grace is — doesn't have room to breathe. The sequel exists at a near-constant pitch of extremity, which makes individual sequences feel less distinct. When everything is loud, nothing is deafening. That said, a late-film sequence involving Faith takes the violence to an uncomfortable, almost jarring register — and while it may be intentional, it lands with a bruising awkwardness that disrupts the film's otherwise carefully calibrated dark humor.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Comeis a sequel that earns more than it should have any right to. It's funnier than expected, gornier than necessary, and anchored by two lead performances — Samara Weaving's ferocious commitment and Kathryn Newton's quiet emotional precision — that together make a genuinely compelling case for this franchise continuing. It isn't the tightly wound original, and it wasn't trying to be. What it is, instead, is a confident, chaotic, darkly hilarious piece of genre filmmaking that knows exactly what its audience wants and delivers it with considerable style. The game isn't perfect — but honey, it's still worth playing.