Ready or Not: Here I Come, the sequel to Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2019 horror comedy Ready or Not, picks up right where its predecessor left off. A few seconds before, in fact, since it opens by replaying the original movie’s final shot, a slow push in on the battered and blood-soaked Grace (Samara Weaving) calmly lighting a cigarette as her life goes up in flames. But this time, the camera stays on her longer, past the final quip and the cut to black, as the weight of what she’s just been through hits home. A foster child who never had, in her words, a “real family,” she thought she’d hit the jackpot, finding a loving husband-to-be who happened to be the eldest scion of a board-game dynasty. But—and there’s always a catch—his family owed its wealth to a literal deal with the devil, and sustaining that deal meant offering up the occasional human sacrifice, which is why she’s sitting on the steps of their flaming mansion in a blood-drenched wedding gown, her mouth twisted into a can-you-believe-this-shit smirk.

In Here I Come, that smirk fades as Grace’s face goes blank. She passes out on those steps, emotionally overwhelmed and physically spent, because while we may have had a grand old time watching her outwit rich idiots and bathe in their gore, it’s substantially less fun to experience the consequences firsthand. From The Wolf of Wall Street to Succession, we love our stories about the ultrarich, the ones that let us vicariously bask in their luxury before watching them get taken down a peg. But even in fiction, we don’t want to know too much about the harm they cause. We’d rather watch the wealthy squirm than the less fortunate suffer.

The second Ready or Not isn’t that much different from the first in that respect. What drives the movie is the spectacle of Grace, toughened by life and made resourceful by necessity, outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting a hunting party of pampered failsons and faildaughters who’ve got everything but, fortunately for Grace, don’t know how to use it. (It’s not much good having a rocket launcher if you don’t know which end the rocket comes out of.) The screenplay, again by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, makes a few tweaks, namely by pitting Grace against a handful of competing families rather than just one, and giving her a sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who has to survive alongside her. (The first film made much of Grace being alone in the world; the second is not much interested in explaining why she never got around to mentioning her sibling.) But there’s a subtle difference in tone, established early on when silvery patriarch Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg) gets the word that the demise of the first movie’s family has opened up a seat at the head of the satanic cabal that runs the whole world. He’s watching TV at the time, footage of a nondescript military quagmire somewhere in the world, explosions accompanied by a caption reading “No End in Sight.” He picks up the phone, speaks a few words, and just like that, the war is over, because he wants it to be.

It’s a joke, and a pretty good one. (A tip of the horned headdress to Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett for recognizing that Cronenberg has always had a wicked sense of humor.) But it’s also a hint that what these people do, the ones who’ve sold their souls for the purpose of mastering ours—it actually matters. Somewhere, far from the room where Chester lies in an elegantly appointed hospital bed, people have died in this war, because the conflict benefited him in some way, or perhaps just because he needed something good to watch. But though it’s staged as a sight gag, the punch line comes with a slap of recognition, because satire is the stuff of headlines now.

The families who assemble to hunt Grace and Faith come from all over the world—a Chinese matriarch (Olivia Cheng) and her chubby teenager (Antony Hall); a pair of slick club kids (Varun Saranga and Nadeem Umar-Khitab) from India; a Latino TV star (Nestor Carbonell)—each a mild variation on a grotesque theme. But it’s the Danforths, Chester’s kids, Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who really mean business, who’ve spent their lives training for this moment rather than assuming that the dirty work will always be done by someone else.

Titus is particularly chilling, especially if you’ve recently been swooning over Hatosy as the dreamy night-shift doctor on The Pitt. Titus shares his piercing blue eyes, but here they’re housed in a face devoid of warmth, or almost anything at all. There’s something almost childlike about the softness of his features, their refusal to form themselves into any definite expression, but it grows scarier the longer we watch him, because we realize that there’s nothing at his center. The others are driven by greed or lust or fear—and not just of losing what they have, because in this game a failure to play by the rules can make you explode into goo. But Titus is pure will, as if he was bred for the sake of winning this contest, and everything else was optional.

Here I Come is, to be blunt, not as much fun as Ready or Not. Some of the feral spontaneity has gone out of Weaving’s performance, and Newton feels too controlled, her character too shapeless for her to fully inhabit. But the diminished enjoyment also seems a bit like the point. This isn’t just a giddy romp where a badass in high-tops channels working-class rage and comes out on top. It’s a little more brutal, a little uglier, with deaths that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s Scream movies. We still get to eat the rich, but there’s a bitter aftertaste.