Samara Weaving in Ready or Not: Here I Come

Pief Weyman/Searchlight Pictures

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[This story contains spoilers for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.]

In Radio Silence’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Ursula Danforth painfully realizes that her twin brother, Titus (Shawn Hatosy), is even more of a raging lunatic than she previously thought. His moral alignment matters when control of the world hinges on the outcome of the latest lethal game of hide-and-seek. The Danforths’ sprawling estate that includes a casino and golf course is hosting the last-minute event in response to Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) eliminating a “High Council” family in the original 2019 film that Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett co-directed. Ursula ultimately decides that she cannot let Titus win their satanic congregation’s most prominent seat, one that their ailing father (David Cronenberg’s Chester Danforth) sacrificed so that his heir and heiress could give their family the best chance to preserve global power for many more years.

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Thus, with Gellar being one of the most iconic scream queens to ever grace the big and small screen, an expectation begins to form that her character is going to sacrifice herself for the sake of two of the most notable scream queens of the last decade, Weaving and Kathryn Newton, and their sister characters of Grace and Faith. Late in the film, Grace exploits a loophole and agrees to marry Titus in order to protect herself and her sister from further bloodshed, rewarding Titus with the “High Seat” at the same time. Prior to their nuptials, the Danforth family’s in-house glam squad cleans Grace up, and that’s when Ursula approaches her to reconsider her plan to wed her psychotic sibling. However, he crashes the parley and brutally snaps Ursula’s neck in front of Grace, subverting the idea of a generational assist between scream queens.

“We really needed to turn the dial up on the doom and the sense of fucking hopelessness as you’re entering the third act,” Gillett tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And casting Sarah Michelle in that part heightens all of that. She is such a legend and an icon that you don’t expect that ending in any way,” Bettinelli-Olpin adds.

Shortly after becoming husband and wife, Grace milks another loophole in the hide-and-seek rulebook and slays Titus, thereby sending the rest of the High Council to slaughter at the hands of their demonic overlord, Le Bail. Grace, Faith and a spared sacrificial goat proceed to walk off into the sunrise, marking a new beginning for the previously estranged siblings. This conclusion raises the question of where the budding franchise could go now that Grace no longer has a target on her back thanks to the High Council being reduced to splatter.

Co-screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy have a pitch for a third Ready or Not movie, one that they have yet to share in detail with Radio Silence. But Gillett does point out that Le Bail’s demented game of hide-and-seek is bigger than just its two recent rounds with Grace.

“Le Bail is still around. The Lawyer [Elijah Wood] is still around. The fun of the first movie and the very definitive end of the second movie is that the mythology still exists,” Gillett says. “Le Bail isn’t a character who wins or loses. He’s just all about chaos. And that seed would allow us to grow any number of stories out of the mythology.”

The film also ends with a dangling thread involving Martina Rajan (Ma&scaron;a Lizdek). Her cowardly husband, Madhu (Varun Saranga), had nominated her to play hide-and-seek in his stead, so she opted to get out of Dodge before all of the participating families met their end at Grace and Titus’ wedding. However, because she agreed to play by signing on the dotted line, Mr. Le Bail took her life off screen as well. Radio Silence nearly included a mid-credit scene to explicitly confirm her ill fate.

“We talked about shooting an end tag where Grace and Faith are still walking on that long road out of the resort. Then they walk by Martina’s crashed car on the side of the road, and it would be filled with splatter and blood,” Gillett shares. “Of course, at the end of the game, her name is on the contract in that book, so she also explodes.”

Below, during the spoile

Ready or Not 2 Ending: Inside That Brutal Death Scene