Ready or Not 2: Here I Come eats (the rich)

Feel as though you have a rageful scream perpetually caught in your throat? Wish you had somewhere to put those feelings of frustration and anger over the state of the world? Want some catharsis with a side of bloody revenge, but, you know, legally?

That’s where genre filmmaking becomes such a mental health lifeline, especially horror, and particularly films like Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Like its predecessor, the film functions as both an adrenaline rush and a darkly hilarious eat-the-rich revenge fantasy, pitting a woman — or in this case two women — against a horde of elitist, sociopathic monsters and letting us watch her cut through them one by one.

Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

It's tense, it's fun, it's gruesome, and it's cathartic, and it meets the collective moment with much-needed, fictional class war.

For those unfamiliar with the first film, it follows a young bride, Grace (Samara Weaving), who, on the night of her wedding into a wealthy, elite family, is forced to play a game of hide and seek. What at first feels like an eccentric but harmless family tradition reveals itself to be a deadly game of cat and mouse, at the behest of the devil himself, with whom the family made a bargain in exchange for wealth and power.

Grace comes out on top, but as we see in the sequel, her battle for survival has just begun. The second film picks up precisely where the first leaves off with Grace, blood-soaked, smoking as her in-laws' estate burns down behind her.

Samara Weaving.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

The action picks up with the arrival of her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who, along with Grace, finds herself in the crosshairs of a group of wealthy and powerful families tracking her down to reclaim the power granted her by, again, the devil, after she becomes the last remaining member of her family.

It's a killer setup for a horror film, but it resonates metaphorically, too. This is not lost on Sarah Michelle Gellar, who stars as Ursula, one of the elites looking to track down and sacrifice the sisters.

“Genre is best at explaining the things either that we can’t explain or the things that we don’t want to truly understand. It gives us an outlet to explore it and to see it without having to mirror too much reality that [it gets] depressing, because we’re already living in it,” she tells PRIDE.

Nestor Carbonell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, and Nadeem Umar-Khitab.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

It's this ability to hold up that mirror while still entertaining that makes horror so powerful, and why it has had such a legacy of being the thematic Trojan horses for cultural critique that would potentially turn off audiences if the approach was more didactic. Elijah Wood, who joins the cast as the literal devil's advocate, known only as “lawyer,” agrees. “When it’s at its best, genre can shine a light on ideas that are real and be thought-provoking and allow for exploration of those ideas. It becomes sort of like a mirror to our experience as human beings,” he tells PRIDE.

That being said, both actors are reveling in their villainous roles. “As an actor, they’re the meatiest roles,” Gellar explains. “In this movie alone you get to make people cry, you get to make people laugh, you get to make people scared. It’s a love story between two sisters, it’s an action movie, like, it’s all in there, and you get to do it all in one job.”

Daniel Beirne, David Cronenberg (portrait) Shawn Hatosy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

While Gellar is best known for her more heroic characters, she brings the same level of humanity to her monstrous ones. “When you play an evil character, you have to give them some humanity or the audience doesn’t connect,” she explains. “Otherwise it’s just, ‘That person’s bad, I hope they die.’ But when you truly give them humanity, the audience goes back and forth, like, ‘Well, I hate them, but also they’re struggling, and is that why they’re making these choices?’”

Wood, who was a fan of the original film, was delighted to sign on to the sequel for his mysterious role. “Having loved that first film and then being asked to participate in a sequel that is honoring that first movie and expands upon the narrative in a way that you really want a great sequel to do was just such a gift to be asked to come to the party,” he says.

Elijah Wood.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

Newton, who stars as Weaving's little sister, has made a career of starring as endearing, complicated, and hilarious antiheroes in horror. Coming from leading roles in films like Freaky, Abigail, and the criminally underappreciated Lisa Frankenstein, she is just as excited to bring her unique approach to this one. “In a genre movie, you have to be weird. You can’t be just one thing, and no one is. We all know someone’s going to die and there’s going to be a final girl, but how do we keep the audience invested? Weird choices,” she tells PRIDE.

But also, she says that audiences will connect with the complicated but ultimately loving dynamic between Faith and Grace as they try to survive the night. “If [Grace] had just been alone in the sequel, it would have been too easy to give up. Now she has someone she’s got to fight for. Sometimes it’s a beautiful thing to stop thinking about yourself so much. Look around you, help someone else out.”

Kathryn Newton.Searchlight Pictures/Pief Weyman

The film also charms by bringing together multiple generations of beloved women in horror, which, for Newton, was an actual dream come true, particularly when she learned that she and Weaving would be starring opposite Gellar, who she had long admired. “I literally fell on the floor because I was like, this is three generations of scream queens coming together in one universe. As a fan of the genre, I was like, fans are going to love this.”

She’s not wrong. The film is exactly the bloody, funny, and culturally cutting escape that many are naturally craving. It expands the world introduced in the original while maintaining what made the first movie so fun. It’s girl power vs. the power-hungry, where wit, grit, and a whole lot of ass-kicking — in a wedding gown, no less — will have audiences cheering for its heroes and leaving them hungry for revolution.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come arrives in theaters March 20. Check out the trailer below!