"Ready Or Not"

      Last Saturday night I saw the comedy horror flick "Ready or Not."

       I recommend that you see it too, and soon - before everyone else has seen it and starts dishing out the spoilers - because I predict that this is  a movie that is going to start picking up steam pretty quick.

      The  plot line follows the chain of events that unwinds when a girl raised in foster homes with no real family marries the man of her dreams,

...who happens to be an heir to the wealth of a
close-knit,
crazy -rich ― and mayhaps a bit
crazy ― family,

...whose fortune was built on the board- and card- game industry.
     The new bride being eager to embrace her husband’s family as her own and for them to embrace her as their own, she gamely goes along with a family tradition that’s sprung on her on her wedding night: Any new person who enters the family must agree to play a game with the family on their first night.
      However, things being seldom what they seem  - in the movies as much as in real life – the young bride,

…brilliantly played by Australian actress Samara  Weaving,

...who has mastered the art of  bug-eyed disbelief and/or fear,

 ...soon learns that in this game the devil is in the details and that she’s acquired the in-laws from Hell – or at least closely affiliated with the place.
       From there ensues a scary, splattery, game of cat-and-mouse ― or rather, a dozen cats and one mouse ― that is nonetheless mostly played for laughs.
      And yet at one point in the movie there is a moment that transcends the horror and comedy when the beleaguered heroine asks her husband how in the world his relatives could do such awful things and he explains that it goes back to their childhoods:

   "You'll do anything your family says is all right."

     That line hit me as being so insightful and true that from that point on  I started seeing this movie as more than just an escapist romp, but as offering a number of metaphors for real life, among them:
  - How children can be shaped - even psychologically trapped - to believe and accept just about anything, no matter how awful or absurd.
    - How hard - sometimes impossible - it is to escape those ties that bind us all, for better or worse, to our families.

  - How some in-laws really put their children's or siblings' spouses through hell.

      I also found themes of:

  The sins of the father being visited not only on the sons, but down through generations,

...the weak confounding the mighty,

...and a family selling its collective soul.
     Well, that could happen, right? 

     (Maybe Tiffany is the lucky one.)