SXSW has always thrived in that sweet spot between discovery and chaos. It’s a place where a scrappy midnight movie can hit just as hard as a prestige premiere. But 2026 is compressed, a leaner version of itself, like the festival trimmed the fat and accidentally exposed the connective tissue. Which makes it all the more amusing that two of its biggest premieres feel like they were separated at birth.
Every so often, the industry coughs up twin movies—those strange, parallel productions that make you wonder if there’s a shared group chat somewhere in Hollywood. “Deep Impact”/”Armageddon,” “Friends With Benefits”/”No Strings Attached,” “Dante’s Peak”/”Volcano.” Same DNA, slightly different mutations. It’s a rare phenomenon. It’s even rarer when both films land at the same festival, effectively daring you to compare them in real time.
Enter “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” and “They Will Kill You.” The two films feel less like coincidences and more like variations on a theme: estranged sisters, satanic elites, and women forced into violently absurd games of survival. Watching them back-to-back at SXSW creates a kind of accidental double feature—one that reveals just how much execution matters when the premise is essentially identical.
‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’
The first “Ready or Not” has always had a soft spot for me. It was the first film I saw when I moved to Texas, and it hit that perfect balance of mean-spirited and playful. Grace (the delightful Samara Weaving) was an instant horror icon: a bride who marries into an elite family of satanists who are board-game obsessed. Due to the luck of the draw, she finds herself in a deadly game of hide and seek. It was clean, nasty, and novel.
The sequel picks up directly after the events of the first film. Grace, still blood-soaked in her wedding dress, is pulled into a hospital for questioning. Before long, she is reunited with her estranged sister (played by another modern scream queen, Kathryn Newton). They are then thrust into yet another “most dangerous game” scenario—this time involving other satanist families.
There’s a version of this that works effortlessly. And to its credit, “Ready or Not 2” does try to plus the material. There are more scream queens, more elite weirdos (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, Kevin Durand, Nestor Carbonell, David Cronenberg), and more elaborate gore explosions. The Radio Silence guys—coming off the last two “Scream” films (not the newest one)—still know how to engineer a set piece, and there’s a sick delight in a lot of the kills.
But the movie gets bogged down in the mechanics of its own existence. The mythology expansion, the connections between families, the sudden estranged sister of it all—it’s the kind of sequel-building where you can feel the screenwriters sweating, trying to justify why this needs to happen again.
Once it clears that throat, the movie settles into something more functional, even fun in bursts. But the novelty is gone. What was once a sharp, self-contained joke now feels like a franchise trying to remember why it was funny in the first place.
Rating: C+
‘The Will Kill You’
A woman answers a housekeeper ad at a mysterious NYC high-rise called The Virgil looking for her estranged sister. She then discovers the community of elites is a group of satanists she needs to fight her way through.
If that logline sounds familiar, that’s because it basically is. Estranged sister (check). Satanists (check). Violent survival gauntlet (check).
And yet, “They Will Kill You” feels like it’s operating on an entirely different frequency.
Starring Zazie Beetz and backed by a game ensemble (Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Tom Felton), the film is barely a movie in the traditional sense. It’s more of an aesthetic object in motion. But it’s alive in a way “Ready or Not 2” never quite is. It plays like a collision of influences: Sam Raimi, Joe Dante, “The Raid”, “Looney Tunes”, “Kill Bill.” They are all filtered through a director who seems less interested in logic than momentum.
The action sequences are the real draw here. They feel tactile, inventive, gory, witty and just a little unhinged, anchored by a genuinely convincing action turn from Beetz. There’s a looseness to the whole thing that works in its favor—it doesn’t stop to explain itself, which ironically makes it easier to accept.
That said, the film does introduce a late-stage ability for its satanist antagonists that essentially drains the movie of tension by the two-thirds mark. It becomes a little frictionless, like the stakes evaporate just as things should be ramping up.
But it’s so fun, and it moves at a decent clip. Of the twin films—each with their own delights and disappointments—this is the one that feels less labored, less concerned with justifying itself, and more interested in just going for it.
Rating: B
SXSW 2026 ran from March 12-March 18. Follow us for more coverage.
