Spoiler Warning: This article contains plot details.
On the day of her wedding, Grace (Samara Weaving) is meeting many of her in-laws for the first time. Her groom, Alex (Mark O’Brien), has been estranged from his family for the entirety of their relationship, and the family members she has met- like his drunk brother Daniel (Adam Brody)- haven’t left a great impression. Even still, Grace grew up in foster homes with no real family of her own, so she’s eager to please them. No matter how bizarre the requests, like participating in family game night on her wedding night. Grace soon learns just how high the stakes are, but for those paying attention and willing to play along, the devil is in the details and hiding in plain sight.
We can thank Rosemary Woodhouse and a key scene in Rosemary’s Baby for teaching us how to deal with anagrams in horror. When she receives the book All of Them Witches and is told the name is an anagram, she uses scrabble tiles to rearrange it until she discovers with dawning horror that it’s referring to her not so benign neighbor.
In Ready or Not, the driving force behind the entire plot is also an anagram – Mr. Le Bail: the Hasbro gamemaster to the Le Domas clan, and the source of their wealth. Patriarch Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny) explains the family history, in which their ancestor bested a series of games orchestrated by Mr. Le Bail and granted them obscene riches in return. To keep it, and their lives, anyone marrying into the family must play a game of Mr. Le Bail’s choosing, via his card box. It’s fitting, then, that Mr. Le Bail’s name is a puzzle game to solve as well.
Le Bail is an anagram for Belial.
As for the Le Domas family name, that’s a trickier puzzle to solve. In ancient Rome, a domus was a specific type of house inhabited by the upper class. That fits. Centuries ago, those with the surname Domas were typically laborers and farmers, which lines up with Tony’s story of their ancestor who sold their family to the devil. But, in keeping with the anagram theme, Le Domas spells out Alex’s eventual betrayal of Grace, “A. Sold Me”; or it might simply reference how the Le Domas’ sell themselves to Belial in general. Of course, screenwriters Gary Busick and Ryan Murphy had something more thematically fitting in mind: fallen angel Asmodel. No matter how you rearrange it, their surname is a warning.
Being that the family is in league with the devil, literally, it becomes clear that this bizarre game night ritual is only an initiation into the Le Domas family if they’re deemed worthy. By worthy, I mean corruptible or morally impure. When Emilie’s (Melanie Scrofano) husband Fitch (Kristian Bruun) married into the family, Mr. Le Bail dictated his game to play was Old Maid, a card game for children. Fitch laughed off his confusion, but Mr. Le Bail pegged his personality from the outset. Like his wife, Fitch isn’t the brightest bulb in the clan but he can be counted on to give his support, no matter how badly he botches it. Similarly, Daniel’s wife Charity (Elyse Levesque) was tasked with playing Chess by Mr. Le Bail, a game of strategy. Charity reveals herself to have been a strategic social climber with a death grip on her married into wealth, so that too is a perfect fit.
As for Grace’s unfortunate receipt of the Hide and Seek card, that’s also easy to understand as the movie progresses; her tenacious will to survive and unbending moral code meant Mr. Le Bail realized she wouldn’t be the soul-selling type come dawn.
Being a Le Domas family member means more than just wedding night pacts with Belial. There are sacrifices to be made on the regular. The first overt insight into this is when Grace finds the family stable as a potential hiding spot. It’s not filled with the typical horses, though, but goats. Grace is understandably too busy to stop and ponder why the Le Domas’ have a stable full of goats, but those who have connected the Belial dots know. It’s confirmed when the perpetually conflicted Alex confesses to a family member later how much it bothers him that slitting goats’ throats on the regular feels normal. The devotion to Mr. Le Bail is steadfast, regardless whether some Le Domases really grasp what that means.
Because many of the family members question the truth behind Mr. Le Bail and if they really could die at dawn if Grace isn’t sacrificed, Ready or Not tries to play the events a little ambiguous. Is the family just maniacally insane, or are their lives at serious risk? But as the saying goes, the devil is hiding in plain sight. The answers are there from the beginning.
