Film / Ready or Not (2019)

In-laws can be murder.

Ready or Not is a 2019 horror comedy film directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett of the filmmaking collective Radio Silence (V/H/S), written by Guy Busick & R. Christopher Murphy, and starring Samara Weaving. Adam Brody, Andie MacDowell, and Henry Czerny also appear in major roles.

Grace (Weaving) has just gotten married to Alex Le Domas (Mark O'Brien) and joined his family's board game and sports "dominion". On the night of their wedding, Alex's family asks Grace to participate in a tradition: every new member of the family must play a game with the others, which is determined by the drawing of a card from a strange old puzzle box. Everyone expects that it will be a standard round of some classic board game, but when Grace draws the card for Hide and Seek, everyone else goes strangely quiet.

Grace is told she must stay hidden until dawn, but she soon learns that her new in-laws are hunting for her while heavily armed with an arsenal of various weapons. One small detail they neglected to mention is that there is a twist to the game: the hider needs to be dead if the seekers want to win, and so Grace must keep hiding or fight back if she wants to survive.

No relation to the book, series, or video game that all share the same title.

This film marked the first theatrically released horror film distributed by Disney in 7 years (via Searchlight Pictures), having not released such a film since Frankenweenie.

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This film provides examples of:

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Zigzagged. When Stevens attempts to run her down in the woods, Grace initially runs in a straight line directly in front of the car. However, at the last second, it occurs to her to dive to the side.
• Accent Slip-Up: Becky's faint Southern accent grows more pronounced as the night goes on and she gets more stressed.
• Accidental Murder: Emilie's incompetence with weapons leads to her accidentally killing two of the maids.
• Action Dress Rip: When she becomes aware of the real danger she's in, Grace tears off the bottom of her dress.
• Action Survivor: Grace could either become one of these or lay down and die. Guess which one she chooses?
• Addled Addict: Emilie is addicted to cocaine and prescription pills, vices that she indulges in even in the middle of the ritual hunt, which means she fucks up a lot and is a danger to friend and foe alike.
• Affably Evil:
  • Mr. Le Bail's sole appearance is to smile and give a respectful nod towards Grace after he kills the Le Domas clan.
  • Fitch is thoroughly an average Joe in every respect. The others find his chattiness irritating and he's the most normal person integrated into the family by a long shot, except he has zero qualms about torturing and attempting to murder an innocent woman for the sake of avoiding some death curse that he himself was highly skeptical about.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg:
  • Charity, when the Le Domas family starts exploding.
  • Alex, when the rest of his family explodes and he's trying to convince Grace to get back with him.
• The Alcoholic: Daniel is said to be this, and he proves it by spending most of the hunt drunk.
• All for Nothing: The Le Domas family made a deal with the devil that brought great wealth to the family, but the failure of one sacrifice wiped out their entire living blood line.
• All Myths Are True: The curse is real.
• Arc Words: "He's/she's here!" While playing Hide and Seek, these words represent the level of loyalty each person has to the family. In the prologue, young Daniel yells them almost immediately, while in the present, he actually gives Grace a head start before doing so. Alex only says them once, when he turns on Grace and finally chooses to rejoin his family in the finale.
• Axe-Crazy: Aunt Helene is the most openly psychotic. Bonus points for her favoured weapon being a battle-axe.
• Battle Butler: Stevens is established as one in the film, but it is quickly deconstructed when he repeatedly fails to intimidate and capture Grace since he is just a glorified servant who has no clue what he's doing.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Justin the On-Star agent does contact the police as Grace begs him to but still deactivates her car because it was reported stolen and insists there's nothing he can do about it. When he asks if there's anything else he can do, she tells him to go fuck himself.
• Beard of Sorrow: Daniel, who spends most of the film drunk.
• Beat: After Daniel finds Grace in the billiards room, they stare awkwardly at each other for a few seconds before he says he's just there to get a drink.
• Behind the Black: Subverted. Tony hides behind a tree to see if Daniel will let Grace go. After knocking Grace out, Daniel calls out to Tony who's surprised Daniel knew he was there. Since Tony was hiding on the same side Daniel approached from, Daniel responds that he's drunk, not blind.
• Big Brother Instinct: Daniel very much has this for Alex.
  • The film's opening shows him trying to protect the young Alex from having to witness or take part in his family's satanic sacrifice of Aunt Helene's husband.
  • At one point, Emilie notes that Daniel has always looked out for Alex.
  • When Daniel finds Grace after her failed escape, she tries to appeal to his good guy nature but also his love for Alex, stating that Alex would never forgive him for killing her. Daniel rebuttals that even if Alex hates him, at least he'd still be alive.
  • In the end, Daniel makes his betrayal of the family known, poisoning them & helping Grace escape which leads to him being shot in the neck by Charity. He bleeds out & dies in Alex's arms despite the latter's desperate pleas.
• Bilingual Bonus: ‘Le Bail’ means ‘lease’ in French—which is arguably what the Le Domas family is doing with his power.
• Bittersweet Ending: Despite making it through the night and the Le Domas family getting their just desserts, Grace loses her husband, who betrayed her in the end, and some parts of her sanity, plus receiving some nasty injuries. In the end, her dream of joining a loving family does not come to pass, but she is still alive and set to inherit an extremely large fortune, plus the family won't be able to sacrifice anyone else. Regardless of said trope in general though, the important thing to see all and hear all for what matters most is that Grace somehow managed to use her wit and determination to survive the whole entire thing throughout the process, safe and sound. That being said, it is likely she will eventually cure and recover very fast, possibly with aid from the police and paramedics, coming to the rescue at the scene of the crime to reveal what happened, upon their arrival that is.
• Black Comedy: It’s a film in which people are gruesomely murdered, but the deaths are treated as annoying mistakes or blunders.
• Blasphemous Boast: Grace remarks that the Le Domases have "more money than God."
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: Grace's dress is covered in blood by the end.
• Bloody Hilarious: Many of the deaths, but especially the family exploding at the end.
• Body In A Bread Box: The Le Domas's sacrificial corpses are dumped in a pit in the goat shed.
• Book Ends:
  • When we first meet Grace, she jokes around with Alex and lets out a snorting laugh. At the end when his family starts exploding in front of her and he tries to beg for forgiveness, she snorts again while laughing.
  • Also, when we first meet Grace, she nervously smokes a cigarette whilst preparing herself for the wedding, and promises Alex that the rest of the family won't see her smoking. At the end, she takes one of Becky's cigarettes and lights it up — the family are all dead at this point, so she doesn't have to worry about them seeing her smoking.
  • When Grace draws the Hide & Seek card, she proposes a toast to Mr. Le Bail. At the end, after the family is dead, Mr. Le Bail appears and raises his glass in respect to Grace.
• Break the Cutie: GOD ALMIGHTY does Grace ever have it rough. In the span of one night, she witnesses multiple murders, commits more than one herself, is betrayed by the man she fell in love with, goes through a car crash, and has to deal with assholes who just drive right by her and ignore her when she needs them most.
• Brick Joke: Justin, the On-Star agent who deactivates the car Grace is trying to flee in tells her he is going to call the police. Fast forward to the very end of the movie (over an hour later In-Universe) and the police finally show up... after the entire Le Domas family had been killed and the mansion is burning down.
• Broken Bird:
  • Aunt Helene is a particularly dark example of the trope, having lost her husband in the Distant Prologue. The hysterical bride pleading for her family to stop has become a sinister and fanatical widow. While the rest of the family welcomes Grace into the fold, Aunt Helene spends the entire affair glaring daggers at the bride.
  • Grace is a classical example. With all the trauma she endured in the span of roughly six hours, she's left a dejected and completely hollow woman by the end with a Thousand-Yard Stare.
• Butt-Monkey: Stevens the Butler becomes this after continuously getting maimed during his botched attempts to capture Grace.
• Bystander Syndrome:
  • Once Grace manages to leave the estate and flag a passing car, the motorist just speeds up upon seeing a blood-spattered woman in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
  • Justin, after being contacted through the in-car vehicle assist to call the police because Grace is being chased by murderers, immediately disables the car, because it had been called in as stolen.
• Call-Back: Just before the game starts, Grace offers a toast to Mr. Le Bail. After the game ends, Mr. Le Bail appears in the flames and toasts her.
• Car Fu: After Grace escapes the mansion's grounds, Stevens attempts to run her down in the woods.
• Casting Gag: Melanie Scrofano (Emilie), best known for her role as Wynonna Earp in the eponymous show (an Action Girl with great shooting skills), plays an incompetent drug-addicted heiress who's a terrible shot with every weapon.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: The police take a whole hour to arrive after being called, although this could be justified as the call was made from a car's vehicle assist.
• Censored Child Death: As the Le Domases begin to explode one by one in the film's climax, Emilie grabs her two young sons and tries to run away with them in a desperate attempt to escape the curse. They manage to make it out of the room — and offscreen — before three more explosions are heard and a rain of blood sprays in from the open door.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early on, Charity complains about the antique weapons and mentions she brought a gun. In the last act, she kills her husband with it and is knocked out when Grace pistol-whips her with it
  • Despite how heartbroken she was in the prologue, Helene seems the most gung ho about the ritual in the present. Just like Alex's Face–Heel Turn in the final act.
  • Le Bail's empty chair in the Inner Sanctum is shown, which is shown to be not actually empty in the finale.
• Children Are Innocent: Harshly subverted. Two separate times, a victim of the family trusts the innocence of a child and tries to ask them for help, and both times the kid willingly betrays them because it's what their family has taught them to do. In kind, Emilie's children are treated as culpable and aren't spared when Le Bail kills the entire family at the end of the movie.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: We first meet Grace while she's preparing for the wedding and having a pre-ceremony smoke. After she has managed to survive the deadly game of Hide and Seek, Grace, covered in Alex's blood, procures Becky's cigarette case from her corpse, sits down on the stairs in front of the burning Le Domas Mansion, takes out a cigarette and starts smoking with a Thousand-Yard Stare on her face.
• Closed Circle: Initially the mansion is kept on lockdown so Grace can't leave the building. After she successfully gets out and steals a car, the service agent she contacts to have call the police disables the car because it's been reported as stolen.
• Clothing Combat: In the woods, Grace chokes Stevens into unconsciousness with a strip torn from her wedding gown.
• Clothing Damage: Grace's wedding dress. After the Action Dress Rip mentioned above, her dress accumulates more and more damage over the course of the film.
• Cluster F-Bomb: When a passing motorist who doesn't even stop when she tries to flag his car while spattered with blood, Grace really lets it rip and spews uninterrupted profanity for almost half a minute straight.
• Combat Pragmatist: Once she starts fighting back, Grace is quick to use any Improvised Weapon she can get her hands on, hit children, and attack weak points like previous injuries.
• Contrived Coincidence: After Grace makes Stevens crash his car, both Daniel and Tony find the exact site of the crash before Grace can leave. It must be noted that Stevens was video-calling the family and they had seen everything (they even tried to warn Stevens), so it's possible they had an idea about her location.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Grace mentions that she was fostered and never felt like she had a real family, which conveniently explains why she has none of her own family there and (in theory) while the family might get away with killing her, though she survives.
• Creator Cameo: Director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin is the voice of the driver of the sports car, and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy are the crossbow experts in the YouTube video.
• Curse Cut Short: Tony prepares to stab Grace in the heart and cries "HAIL S..." before the poison Daniel gave everyone kicks in. Subverted a little later when he and the rest of the family chant "hail Satan" multiple times during their second attempt at the sacrifice.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: Heroic variant. Grace comes to in the backseat of a car as Stevens is driving her back to the house. He is too distracted by the opera music playing full blast on the car stereo to notice, and she kicks him in the face, causing a crash that kills him.
• Dark Reprise: As the mansion burns down, the heat from the fire causes the record player to start up again, playing a warped version of the Hide-and-Seek song.
• Deadpan Snarker: Helene, which is fitting for the chilliest member of the Le Domas clan.
  Helene: (to Emilie) Brown-haired niece. You continue to exist.
• Deal with the Devil: The Le Domas family made a pact with Satan generations ago. He gave them great wealth, and the means to gain more; all he required were sacrifices. Goats usually do, but a human sacrifice is required (possibly once per generation) as well.
• Death Glare: If looks could kill, Aunt Helene would've taken out Grace in the first 15 minutes of the film.
• Death of a Child: Georgie and Gabe explode (offscreen) along with their mother when the family is wiped out by Mr. Le Bail.
• Death's Hourglass: While Alex is begging to be spared, the "Hide and Seek" song plays through a countdown, ending on the "zero" and killing him when Grace gives him his ring back.
• Deconstruction: Of a variety of clichés related with Hunting the Most Dangerous Game and Implacable Man:
  • The villains are a wealthy family who engage in Hunting the Most Dangerous Game as part of a Deal with the Devil, and are armed to the teeth in order to do so. Except it's been a few decades since they actually had to hunt someone in order to complete the ritual, meaning that they're incredibly rusty at doing so; and they probably weren't anticipating having to do so this evening. And on top of this, they're all a bunch of lazy, entitled rich jerks used to having others wait on them, with the usual vices this implies. So instead of being one person faced against a remorselessly efficient team of hunters, as this trope usually is, it turns out the hunt is a lot more even-sided.
  • Unlike Stevens the butler, the maids are too young to have been involved in the last game of Hide-and-Seek. When two of the maids are (accidentally) killed by the Le Domases, the third takes to hiding in a dumbwaiter, terrified she's next.
  • Stevens himself. At the end of the day, he’s still a butler, not a trained assassin. Grace is much younger and more agile than him, so he doesn't have an easy time of subduing her.
  • Grace stops choking Stevens and leaves immediately after he stops moving. As she's driving his car away, he starts getting up, having only passed out momentarily.
  • After striking Tony twice with his old fashioned lantern, Grace carelessly tosses it away, causing it to start a fire.
• Deconstructive Parody: Of the Hunting the Most Dangerous Game plot. A wealthy family literally hunts an unarmed woman as part of a twisted game...except they're Upper-Class Twits who barely know what they're doing, most of them are drunk or high or both, and even the more competent ones are too apathetic, too old, or too out-of-practice to be as threatening as they could be.
• Determinator: Grace goes through hell and back to survive the night. A massive gun-shot hole in her hand, a deep cut in her back, a car crash, a knife to the shoulder - nothing stops her from pushing forward to live.
• Distant Prologue: The movie starts with a scene set 30 years before the events of the rest of the film, namely the last time the family played "hide and seek".
• The Dog Bites Back: The Movie. This movie might as well be titled, "This Is What Happens When You Fuck With the Wrong Girl!"
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: Stevens successfully captures and ties up Grace before driving back to the mansion, calling the Le Domases as he drives. After the phone call, he cranks up the 1812 Overture and cheers to himself, only for Grace to kick him in the head, causing him to crash the car.
• The Dragon: Stevens tries to be one to the Le Domas family, but fails miserably every time.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: Grace manages to wrest a revolver off Charity in a Gun Struggle. She then tries to shoot Charity, but the hammer falls on an empty chamber, and she realises that all six shots had been fired during the struggle.
• Dying Alone: A cynically comical version of this trope. Alex is the last Le Domas left. He begs Grace to take him back right after he stabbed her in the shoulder, claiming he is terrified of dying and trying to convince her that he is changed and that's why he isn't blowing up. After seeing his entire family die, he lasts just long enough for Grace to say she is leaving him too and wants a divorce.
• Enfante Terrible: Emilie and Fitch's two sons are just as crazy and murderous as their parents. 30 years ago Daniel was this as well, though he did not attempt to kill Helene's husband by himself when he was a child and shows great regret for it as an adult.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Though most of the family is made up of unrepentant killers, most of them do genuinely love each other. When Becky is killed, the rest of the family is obviously heartbroken. Even Charity is clearly shocked and horrified after shooting her husband Daniel. The exceptions are Aunt Helene, who doesn't seem to care about anything but the ritual after her husband's death in the prologue, and Fitch, who considers abandoning them all when things go downhill.
• Evil Elevator: Dora, one of the maids, is crushed to death by the door of the dumbwaiter.
• Exact Words: Le Bail allows Grace to live because, as the Le Domas family stated, you have to play the game to be a family member. By surviving past dawn, Grace isn’t technically a member at all, and thus is exempt from their punishment.
  • A second interpretation: Grace did play the game and survived the night, meaning she would be part of the family if it weren't for Helene. But as soon as she told Alex she wants a divorce, she removed herself from the family, with Le Bail both acknowledging her survival and honoring her wish by exploding Alex in line with the rest of the family, thus keeping her alive.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Except for the prologue set 30 years before, the entire story takes place in less than 24 hours, with the bulk of it happening between midnight and dawn.
• Eyes Are Unbreakable: Stevens's eye seems to be completely unharmed despite Grace breaking a teapot full of boiling water on his face.
• Face–Heel Turn: Alex spends most of the film solidly on Grace's side, to the point of having to be handcuffed to a bedpost by his family to stop him from sabotaging their efforts to kill her. Sadly, the deaths of his brother and mother, coupled with Grace's decision that she just can't be with him after everything that's happened over the course of the movie, cause him to turn against her at the last moment.
• Failed a Spot Check: Fitch doesn't spot Grace right outside the window he's standing next to because he's busy texting on his phone.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Helene's attempts to explain how they have to kill Grace for the sacrifice to count keep getting interrupted by the maid choking on her blood until Helene has enough and cuts her head off.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A subtle one, but at the very beginning, when we first meet Daniel, he sings, "here comes the groom, shitting his pants, he can't believe that his life is nearly over!". Alex dies with the rest of his family at the end, spending the last five minutes of his life desperately panicking and pleading with Grace to stay with him.
  • The fact that Emilie has a drug problem is foreshadowed the very first time we meet her, as she's very hyper and rubbing something off her nose. During the hunt she is seen snorting cocaine.
  • Charity calmly tells Daniel she'd rather die before giving up the La Domas fortune. She desperately offers to give it all back and return to where she came from when Mr. Le Bail starts killing off the family members one by one.
  • During a rant Tony mentions that the entire Van Horn family died horribly because they reneged on their deal with Mr. Le Bail, and Daniel's reply implies that the official story is that they all died in a fire. By the end of the movie, the entire Le Domas family has died horribly because they failed to sacrifice Grace and the mansion is burning in a massive fire.
  • Alex admits that he proposed to Grace because he was afraid of losing her. After his brother dies and Grace kills his mother, Alex realizes Grace won't stay with him if she survives. So he captures her, and tries to complete the ritual.
  • Helene tells Tony that when Alex was a child, he once saw Mr. Le Bail sitting in his chair in the family's ceremony room. Grace sees him as well when she's left the only survivor after Le Bail's wrath.
  • The board games seen in the opening are called "Family Ritual" and "Le Bail's Gambit."
  • During the wedding photos, Charity tells Daniel that Grace will never be part of the family. Daniel replies, "Of course not, she has a soul." At the time this seems like a slight against his wife and family. Later it is revealed that members of the family have sold their souls to Mr. Le Bail.
  • When Grace gets captured by Stevens, she has a nightmare where she sees Alex telling her she's safe and they are leaving, before she sees him in a red lighting wearing the mask worn by the family in the prologue. It hints that Alex will turn against her to save his family.
• From Dress to Dressing: After climbing out of the goat pit, Graces rips the sleeve off her wedding gown and uses it to bandage her Impaled Palm.
• Gold Digger: Daniel's wife Charity very clearly and openly married him for his money. Everyone is aware of it and nobody holds any grudges about it, either. How desperate was she before they got married? Daniel explained the ritual game night to her and how it can turn. She didn't even blink, fully aware that the family might well murder her. This seems to have even won her their respect.
• Gorn: Grace's gunshot wound through her left hand, especially when she's forced to hook the hole through a loose nail in order to climb out of a charnel pit after the ladder breaks.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Emilie and her sons run out of the room before they are heard exploding one after another off-screen.
• Graceful Loser: Le Bail, after the Le Domas explode, he appears in a fire blaze and gives a respectful nod to Grace for surviving the night and not becoming part of the family.
• Gun Struggle: Grace and Charity wrestle for control of charity's revolver after Charity shoots Daniel. Grace ends with control of the gun and tries to shoot Charity, only to suffer Dramatic Ammo Depletion—all of the bullets having being fired during the struggle—so she settles for bashing the other woman in the face with the butt.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted. The men only use ranged weapons while half the women use melee weapons.
• He Knows Too Much: Part of the reason Helene still tries to kill Grace after it seems the curse isn't real.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: After the ritual fails, Alex tries to claim to be back to being the man Grace loves after the rest of his family gruesomely explodes. As soon as Grace throws her wedding ring in his face, he follows them.
• Hide-and-Seek Horror: Grace marries into a family with a tradition of playing board games, which are chosen by drawing a card from a mysterious puzzle box. When the draws the "Hide and Seek" card, she's roped into a Deadly Game where the entire family is hunting her down while armed to the teeth, and she has to hide and survive until dawn.
• Hollywood Satanism: The Le Domas family are an obscenely wealthy group of cultists who got their wealth through an ancestor's Deal with the Devil with Le Bail, implied to be Satan by their ritual. In order to keep their wealth, they must perform a game when a new Le Domas marries into the family, along with some unspecific animal sacrifices involving goats. Usually the game is benign, but occasionally the game is Hide-And-Seek, where the bride or bridegroom is hunted on the grounds of the family manor before being sacrificed before dawn.
• Honor Before Reason: Justin, the On-Star agent Grace contacts via the Le Domases car, remotely deactivates the car for being stolen despite her having already told him she's being chased by people trying to kill her, citing it's company policy.
• Hope Spot:
  • Presumably the reason Le Bail waits to kill the Le Domas family until after they conclude the curse isn't real when they fail to sacrifice Grace in time.
  • Initially it seems Alex will be spared from the curse for being a White Sheep, only for Le Bail to kill him last.
  • Daniel's Heel–Face Turn towards the tail end—he interrupts the ritual by making his family sick and freeing Grace, they seemed to have dodged the pursuers, and all they need to do is save Alex and flee. And then Charity shows up...
• Horror Hates a Rulebreaker: The protagonist must spend the entire night on the mansion's grounds in a literal life or death game of cat and mouse and be sacrificed before dawn, lest the family suffer a terrible fate. The more squeamish family members twice raise the question of whether newcomers (Grace, in this case) must be the sacrifice, as several maids were offed during the game, but Aunt Helene is insistent that the help doesn't count. At the end Mr. Le Bail, true to his word, allows Grace to leave with a respectful nod, and kills off the entire Le Domas family as the sun rises.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: How the Le Domas family plays "Hide and Seek".
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Subverted. Stevens only thinks he's one of those.
• Hypocrite:
  • Alex tries to beg Grace for his life by claiming he doesn't want to die. She furiously points out she didn't either, but that didn't stop him trying to kill her.
  • Charity sneers at Grace for being too low-class to marry into the Le Domas empire. It's later implied that her background is just as bad as Grace's, if not considerably worse.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Emilie keeps killing the maids by accident. Eventually, the rest of the family stops giving her shooting weapons.
• Impaled Palm: Georgie shoots Grace straight through the palm. She later places that hole around an exposed nail to painfully haul herself out of the Goat Pit.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Justified for various reasons.
  • Emilie is high on cocaine and pills, causing her to miss Grace from less than twenty feet away. Somehow, though, she does manage to kill two of the maids by accident with one shot each.
  • Charity lines up a perfect shot on Grace, but doesn't realize her harpoon gun fires in an arc, so she misses as well.
  • Becky, who's implied to have been the one to shoot Helene's bridegroom in the Distant Prologue, misses Grace from a similar distance as Emilie and implies she hasn't practiced archery since the previous game.
• Improvised Weapon: At various points, Grace uses a tea pot, the sash of her wedding gown, and Le Bail's magic box as weapons.
• Insistent Terminology: Played for laughs with this exchange:
  Grace: I can't believe that in half an hour I will be part of the Le Domas gaming... dynasty, empire?
  Alex: Uh, dominion, we prefer "dominion".
• Instantly Proven Wrong: At one point Emilie claims that her sons are innocent children who don't deserve to die because of the family's Deal with the Devil. Immediately after she says this, her son wakes up from being knocked out by Grace and informs her and Daniel that he shot Grace with a pistol, trying to kill her because that’s what the rest of the family does. Emilie seems oblivious to this trope being in play, but the look on Daniel's face shows that he very much notices.
• Irony: The La Domases refuse to accept Grace as part of their family, yet in the end she stands to inherit their entire fortune. In the eyes of the law she's the only surviving member of the La Domas clan because she was still legally married to Alex before he died.
• It Works Better with Bullets: Grace attempts to shoot a door's lock with the double barrel elephant gun, only to realize she forgot to load the weapon. Cue a tense sequence of her trying to load the gun while Stevens the butler obliviously whistles classical music and makes tea. Then it turns out the ammunition is for display only, forcing Grace to ditch the gun.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: Perfectly understandable given the circumstances, but Grace is really foul-mouthed.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • After Grace does an Action Dress Rip of her bridal dress and grabs an oversized elephant gun, along with Badass Bandolier with ammo for it, she has a chance to see herself in a mirror.
  Grace: (clearly surprised with what she sees) Jesus...
  • Gets a reprisal in the finale, after the whole La Domas family is dead after exploding into Ludicrous Gibs and Mr. Le Bail shows up in a burst of fire just to nod Grace in acknowledgement.
    Grace: (unfazed by any of this) Fuck...
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Dora the maid yells to reveal Grace's location the second Grace tells her that the family is after Grace and not Dora. Even as she is doing this, the dumbwaiter she is halfway out of activates and crushes her to death.
  • The entire Le Domas family (except for Daniel) gets what's coming to them when they fail to kill Grace by dawn.
• Laxative Prank: Used by Daniel to interrupt the family's satanic ritual and rescue Grace.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Grace has moments of this throughout the whole film, but there's one that sticks out in particular. After Charity kills Daniel for freeing Grace from the ritual, Grace calmly walks right up to her, grabs Charity's gun and bashes her face in. After that, she vengefully brutalizes Tony and smashes Becky's head until she's dead with no remorse.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • When they start having trouble finding Grace, some of the Le Domas suggest using the security cameras to find her. While Helene insists it's against tradition, Tony argues that's only because the tradition started before security cameras were invented.
  • Whenever one of the maids is killed by accident, the family debates whether they can count this as the sacrifice or not. They ultimately decide not to risk it and keep going after Grace.
• Louis Cypher: The name of the benefactor of the Le Domas family is "Le Bail", which is an anagram of Belial, one of the names of the devil.
• Ludicrous Gibs: How Mr. Le Bail slaughters all of the surviving Le Domases at the end, painting the walls of the family room — and Grace — red with blood.
• Made of Iron: A more realistic example than most. Grace survives being stabbed with a kitchen knife, taking a gunshot wound through her left hand which she is then forced to use as leverage to escape a pit, being cut slipping through an iron fence, being unbuckled during a car crash, knocked out with a butt of a rifle, and stabbed by a dagger. It's shown that all these acts are incredibly painful, and at the end of the movie she's barely able to walk from all her injuries.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The last time the family played "Hide and Seek", they wore masks. It was not part of the tradition; apparently it was Alex's grandfather's idea, drawing off of the popularity of '80s slasher movies.
• Mama Bear: The matriarch of the Le Domas family, in spades. She genuinely loves her children and grandchildren, and rages when Daniel dies. Emilie tries to be one, really only seeming to care when it comes to her sons. But she's just... not very good at it. Or anything else.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Most of the Le Domas family is rather well dressed. Le Bail is likewise wearing a well-made shirt and vest in his sole appearance.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The entire Le Domas family reacts with silent horror when the game card Grace draws reads "Hide and Seek", because it means they'll have to kill her before sunrise.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Le Bail, the Le Domas family's demonic patron, is invisible and while the older members of the cult fear him, the younger members (especially those who married in) doubt his existence. And yet, there are a number of contrived coincidences whenever the Le Domases try to break from tradition or Grace attempts to leave. And then the ending shows he is very, very real when he punishes the Le Domas' failure with a gory death for the entire family and a tip of his glass to Grace for besting them.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Le Domas" is an anagram for "Asmodel", a demon from medieval occult lore.
  • Likewise, "Le Bail" is an anagram of "Belial", one of the many names of the Devil.
  • The other Satan-worshipping family who failed is called "Van Horne", which seems to reference the horns of Satan. May also be a Shout-Out to The Witches of Eastwick.
  • On a more humorous note, this video by Film Herald notes that "Le Domas" sounds awfully close to "Le Dumbass" — and given their staggering incompetence throughout the film, one would not be unjustified in calling them that.
  • 'Alexander' comes from the Greek meaning 'defender/helper of mankind'; Alex spends a great deal of the film helping his bride survive the night against the family tradition.
• Mercy Lead: By default, Grace is given a run-up of "count to 100", to set up the game. Upon running into her in the billiards room, Daniel offers her a ten-second head start before he calls the rest of the family.
• The Millstone: Though she's trying, every notable thing Emilie does in the hunt sets the family back.
• Mirthless Laughter: Grace starts laughing after Le Bail kills the Le Domas family, seemingly caught between relief and possible Sanity Slippage.
• Moment Killer: While Grace and Alex are making out, Helene suddenly appears in the room, freaking out Grace.
• My Greatest Second Chance: As a child, Daniel turned Helene's new husband over to his family. His helping Grace is implied to be him doing what he should have done then.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Grace actually fires the elephant gun in the trailer. In the movie? No such luck.
• No Fair Cheating: Alex says that a few members of the family tried to avoid the whole thing by getting married (presumably through eloping) and not playing any game. This always resulted in the immediate deaths of them and their spouse.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Helene claims Alex will eventually participate in the hunt because he's too much like her. She's right.
• Offscreen Teleportation: After the car Grace stole is remotely disabled, Stevens catches up to her in seconds despite her having sped off two or three minutes prior and logically being at least a couple miles away.
• Off with His Head!: After getting fed up with the dying maid's gurgling interrupting her, Helene walks over and cuts her head off with a battle axe.
• Ornamental Weapon: The family uses the old hunting weapons hanging in the game room in their hunt for Grace. Grace later arms herself with an elephant gun they left behind but the ammo she grabs is merely decorative.
• Out of Focus: Alex gets handcuffed to a bed throughout most of the second act.
• Pistol-Whipping: After Charity shoots Daniel, Grace takes her gun and tries to shoot her, then realizes there's no more bullets and hits her in the face with the gun.
• Police Are Useless: While they are called, the cops don't show up for over an hour, well after everything's over.
• "Pop!" Goes the Human: The final fate reserved to the surviving members of the Le Domas family by Mr. Le Bail when they fail to sacrifice Grace by sunrise. And yes, it includes Emilie and Fitch's sons.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "I want a divorce."
• Punch-Clock Villain: While the Le Domas family includes both heroes and complete lunatics, several family members are okay with killing Grace to save themselves, but feel no real malice towards her.
• Punctuated Pounding: Grace repeatedly declares "Fuck. Your. Family." while bashing Becky's head in with Le Bail's box.
• Real After All: Initially nothing happens when dawn comes with Grace still alive, causing the Le Domases to think the curse wasn't real, only for all of them to start exploding in a shower of blood.
• Reckless Gun Usage: The Le Domas family is pretty cavalier with their ranged weapons:
  • Early in the game, Fitch casually points his loaded crossbow at Becky, who pointedly pushes it away from her.
  • Emilie fires several shots at Grace despite half the family being behind her and nearly hits them.
  • Emilie kills the first maid by firing without taking the time to confirm the target ("Does she look like she's wearing a giant white wedding dress, Emilie!?"). This is actually a twofer, as they aren't supposed to kill Grace, so she wasn't even aiming at the right part of the body.
  • Emilie (sensing a pattern?) kills the second maid due to poor trigger discipline, resulting in her accidentally firing the crossbow. At this point, her family seems to wise up and no longer gives her projectile weapons.
• Redemption Equals Death: Daniel ends up trying to help Grace escape, but he is then shot by his wife Charity for dooming them without a sacrifice for their ritual.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: The fate of the Van Horne family is left unspecified, beside the fact that all evidence was destroyed in the immolation of their house. In the end, we see what may have happened to them.
• The Reveal: Mr. Le Bail was in the house all along, observing the events from his designated chair.
• Rule of Three:
  • Three times Grace gets her hands on a gun only for it to be useless.
  • Three different people try to help the Le Domases find Grace and each are killed before they can: One of the maids is shot before she can finish saying where Grace is, another is crushed by the dumbwaiter as she calls out, and Stevens gets into a car crash as he's bringing Grace back to the mansion.
• Screaming Warrior: After escaping the second attempted ritual sacrifice, Grace lets out what can only be described as a Banshee scream.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: At one point Fitch suggests he and Charity simply cut and run, presumably figuring that since they only married into the family, they'd be spared any curse.
• Shout-Out:
  • Emilie and Fitch's son is named Georgie.
  • My Cousin Rachel is mentioned to be a relative that was killed because of the curse.
  • After the third and last maid is killed, Daniel sardonically quips, "And Then There Were None."
• Sore Loser: Aunt Helene wants to kill Grace even after the dawn light breaks and the ritual fails. She immediately explodes after stating her intentions. It is implied that she is bitter after the death of her own husband in the previous ritual. Of course, this is also simply pragmatic. Grace knows WAY too much for them to let her live.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To You're Next, another darkly comedic horror film about a young woman fighting to survive in the home of the wealthy Big, Screwed-Up Family of her lover. That film leaned much closer to the "horror" side of the Horror Comedy spectrum and had the family be among the victims of the killers, whose true goals and identity were presented as a twist. This film, meanwhile, is much more comedic and has the family themselves as the villains. Both of them even star Australian actresses as the protagonists, but while in You're Next Erin was invoked herself Australian as well, which was used to explain her badass feats, Grace is an American woman who's simply played by an Australian.
• Stealth Pun: Aunt Helene, an old battle-axe if there ever was one, wields a literal old battle-axe.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Charity insists she'd rather die than lose the Le Domas family's wealth. When presented with the reality of actually dying, she starts begging to be spared.
  • Since Alex never warned Grace about any of the family rituals prior to the wedding night and having to constantly fight for her life against said family, Grace is openly distrustful toward him and doesn't even allow him to get close. Whatever bond they had is pretty much gone by that point and it's certainly not helped when Alex decides to fully follow in his family's footsteps in the climax.
  • Most of the Le Domas family are at least mildly skeptical of the family's alleged Deal with the Devil. Even Tony, who believes in it the most after Helene, scoffs at his sister's claims that Alex once saw Le Bail, saying Alex was a child who likely either imagined it or misremembered.
  • The Le Domases are a group of Upper Class Twits with only the barest idea what they're doing during the game. Even armed to the teeth, they're not effective killers.
  • Tranquilizer darts' potency isn't uniform and thus usually can't keep a target out for more than a few minutes, let alone hours, unless designed with that in mind. Stevens finds this out when he uses a couple on Grace, only for her to wake up (if groggy) soon after and cause him to crash his car.
• Symbolism: Grace's dress acts as an indication of her feelings throughout the story. In the beginning, it's pure and pristine, like her love for Alex. But after learning the nature of the Le Domases' traditions, her dress gradually grows more torn and less white as the movie progresses, reflecting her loss of innocence and waning affection for Alex or his family. After Alex's betrayal (and the Le Domases' deaths), Grace's dress is stained with blood and worse for wear, reflecting how she's indubitably lost her innocence and completely fallen out of love with Alex.
• Tears of Fear: Grace cries with a look of sheer terror on her face after Alex explains the truth of "Hide and Seek" to her.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe. The Le Domas children argue that they should be able to use the house cameras for the hunt because the only reason they weren’t used in the first hunt was because they didn’t exist yet.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: After failing to save her husband from the ritual thirty years earlier, Helene becomes one of the most brutal and vicious hunters amongst the Le Domas clan.
• Thicker Than Water:
  • Alex spends most of the movie helping Grace, but Aunt Helene believes that when it comes down to it, he will choose them over her. She's right.
  • As it turns out, this does not apply to Daniel, though him saving Grace is somewhat an effort to honor his brother's wishes.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: The last we see of Grace, in the final shot of the film, is her sitting on the stairs in front of the burning Le Domas Mansion as police arrive while giving a blank, glassy-eyed stare offscreen.
• Token Good Teammate: Alex initially appears to be this for the family, but by the end he embraces his heritage and begins taking part in the ritual to kill Grace. Daniel turns out to be a better example; he's clearly unenthusiastic about the ritual and his family in general, dispassionately lets Grace escape at one point, and ultimately dies saving Grace's life.
• Trapped in Villainy: How many of the Le Domases see themselves. They don't want to kill Grace, and some of them genuinely like her, but they believe that failing to sacrifice her will result in the death of the entire family. And that belief proves to be correct.
• Villainous Cheekbones: Chiselled cheekbones on narrow faces is a common look among the Le Domases, particularly Becky, Daniel, and Emilie. Although Alex does bear a resemblance to the rest of his immediate family, his features are noticeably softer, reflective of his perceived status as the White Sheep.
• Villain Respect: Implied. Mr. Le Bail gives Grace a congratulatory nod for surviving the night.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot:
  • Grace has hers when she realizes she's fallen into a root cellar... filled with the rotting corpses of previous victims.
  • Later, when the family attempts to sacrifice Grace the first time, Daniel poisons the goblet of blood with the stuff they were given to pour on the dead maids (which Tony says is hydrochloric acid), and frees Grace while everyone else is puking up blood.
• Wall of Weapons: A wall of centuries-old weapons in the Le Domas ritual room.
• Wealthy Ever After: It's implied that Grace stands to inherit the entire La Domas fortune; since she's legally Alex's widow, she's technically the only surviving member of the family.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • Daniel catches Grace alone in the study. He states he cannot help her, but does let her run and gives her a head start. Ultimately, he chooses to help her escape.
  • Alex also finds Grace alone at the end of the film, but as she just killed his mother and (indirectly) got his brother killed, he turns on her.
• White Is Pure: Invoked by Grace Le Domas's white wedding dress as it is used to represent Grace's determination to survive the night. The condition of the dress becomes more damaged and stained as the film continues as Grace is forced to defend herself and escape from her in-laws.
• White Sheep: Alex Le Domas, and to a lesser extent Daniel. Both try to protect Grace from the family over the course of the night, Alex because she's his bride and Daniel because as a child he got the previous sacrifice killed by calling out to his family where they were hiding. Daniel dies protecting Grace, while Alex performs a Face–Heel Turn when he realizes Grace doesn't love him anymore after a horrific night being hunted by his family.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: During the three times Graces gets at the mercy of the Le Domases, they get her Bound and Gagged instead of killing her, leaving her several chances of escaping. Justified, since the objective of the Hide and Seek is not to actually kill her, but to incapacitate Grace long enough to sacrifice her during a satanic ritual before dawn.
• Within Arm's Reach: Becky is strangling Grace and Grace is seconds from passing out - at which point Grace manages to twist around and grab the edge of the tablecloth, pulling down Le Bail's box, which she then uses to bludgeon Becky and get the upper hand.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • After Georgie shoots Grace in the hand, she punches him in the face.
  • Mr. Le Bail has no qualms blowing up Emilie's sons along with the rest of the family.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Grace tries to convince Daniel that he is this. She's proven correct, though tragically, it gets him killed.
• You Have Failed Me: Mr. Le Bail slaughters the remaining Le Domas family members when they fail to kill Grace by sunrise.
• You Killed My Mother: Alex was always willing to help Grace survive until he realizes she beat Becky to death, at which point he gives her up for the ritual. That and realizing Grace doesn't feel anything toward him anymore except disgust.
• You Will Be Spared: After killing the entire Le Domas family for failing to kill Grace, Mr. Le Bail allows her to leave instead of killing her, possibly because, as the family members stated, one has to play the game before becoming a family member. Her survival prevents her from being counted as one. It's also implied that Grace could've gotten Alex spared as well if she had accepted his apology, but when she asks for a divorce and throws the ring at him, he explodes as well.

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