Samara Weaving in Horror Sequel

Pity the poor horror movie hero. Should they be fortunate enough to survive their unimaginably horrific ordeal with enough ingenuity and panache, odds are good the movie gods will only force them to endure it all over again, at higher intensity and to lower acclaim.

And so it is that Grace (Samara Weaving), who ended 2019’s Ready or Not the sole survivor of the wedding night from hell, barely gets a puff of her cigarette before she finds herself the unwilling participant of another most dangerous game. But though Ready or Not 2: Here I Come doubles down on everything that made the original work, the returns are diminishing. It’s a good enough time, but a downgrade from the last time.

Much of the pleasure of Ready or Not lay in its simplicity: It was no more and no less than an ultra-violent rendition of hide and seek, backed up by some pretty straightforward “deal with the devil” lore. What kicked it up to the next level was Weaving’s singular performance as a final girl, punctuated by shrieks so blood-curdling they sounded downright operatic, and some nice bits of character comedy in the margins, as most of the new in-laws hunting her proved to be not only evil but hilariously stupid.

Here I Come, which reunites directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, offers more of everything. Where Grace was the sole target in Ready or Not, she’s joined this time by her similarly scrappy, similarly blond, similarly thematically named sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). Where the Le Domases had seemed a singularly devilish family, this film reveals they were just one of six ultra-wealthy Satan-worshipping clans scattered across the globe, and not even the most influential one.

That honor goes to the casino-owning Danforths, whose patriarch (David Cronenberg, in a brief but amusing cameo) wields enough power to call off entire wars with a single phone call. (At a time when it’s become horrifyingly clear how easy it is for one asshole billionaire to start a war, the idea that another could end it just as offhandedly is maybe the most plausible part of the whole movie.) But with the Le Domas lineage annihilated, the high seat of the council of Mr. Le Bail (a.k.a. Satan) is now up for grabs. The remaining families gather at the Danforths’ sprawling Connecticut estate to determine which one will be the first to kill Grace, and therefore to secure the throne.

The element of surprise has mostly worn off, even if Grace tells Faith that one never really gets used to people spontaneously combusting right in front of you. But the appeal is only somewhat worse for wear. Here I Come still may not have much to say about class struggle beyond “the 0.00000001% sure do suck,” but it’s still fun to watch them flail ineptly with their retrograde weapons, whine about their unrelatable problems (“At least sanitize it first,” one complains when he’s handed a sharp pen to sign his name in blood), or get killed off in inventively gruesome ways.

Weaving remains a ferociously magnetic lead, even if she gets less screaming to do this time. And if the character’s Chucks-and-bloodstained-gown look felt like a revelation in the first film, here it might as well be Peter Parker putting on his Spider-Man suit for the way the crowd at my SXSW premiere screening cheered.

Then there are the new additions to enjoy. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy (The Pitt) share a believable toxic sibling energy as the Danforth twins, Ursula and Titus, who’ve been training their whole lives for just this occasion. Francesca (Maia Jae), the daughter of a Spanish TV host (Néstor Carbonell), introduces personal vengeance into the mix as the jilted fiancée of Grace’s own late husband. And a viewing room where heirs are allowed to watch the game becomes the film’s comic highlight, with lesser siblings and children going from boisterously trash-talking one another to quaking in their boots as the possibility of losing the game, and thus dying out completely as a bloodline, becomes horrifyingly real.

But with new pleasures come new perils. One is the expansion of the lore, which grows so convoluted it necessitates the introduction of a whole new character to explain and re-explain the rules. While Elijah Wood, who as just recently seen in Yellowjackets and I Love LA excels at playing weird little guys, is ideally cast as Mr. Le Bail’s unflappable lawyer, he’s not a character so much as an exposition machine.

The other is the pressure to raise the stakes on a story that had seemed intense enough already. Through no fault of Newton’s, Faith functions less as a second protagonist than a prop to give Grace more emotional investment in the proceedings by saddling her with guilt over their estrangement or opportunities to nobly sacrifice herself. Meanwhile, in attempting to give Grace an even bigger, badder, darker villain to face this time, the film overshoots its mark, raising the specter of domestic violence in ways that feel just slightly too plausible to fit with the film’s otherwise cartoonish gore.

Here I Come still comes out ahead, in the end, delivering enough of the good stuff to keep a fan yelping and laughing and cheering throughout. But should its creators be eyeing a third gamble on this universe, it may be time for them to do what so many of the Danforths’ casinogoers surely wish they had: ponder the wisdom of quitting while they’re ahead.