A Simple Favour

A Simple Favour is a pretty delicate balancing act. It's a thriller told with a broad sense of humour (even slapstick at times). One false move could have been deadly, resulting in a film self-serious, or straining to be relevant. But A Simple Favour, directed by Paul Feig, has its cake and eats it too. It's suspenseful, but also hilarious. It's insightful about the head games women can play with each other, but it doesn't burden itself with trying to be meaningful. It's not trying to say something about how we live now or anything like that. What a relief to watch a film unafraid of letting its hair down - reflective, I believe, of the film's leading ladies. The plot shares some similarities with Gone Girl, but that's where the comparison should end. Gone Girl took itself very seriously. A Simple Favour doesn't take itself seriously at all. And that's a good thing.

Single super-mom, Stephanie Smothers, played by Anna Kendrick, meets the mother of her son's best friend, Emily Nelson, Blake Lively, who likes to drink, has a demanding job, and isn't much of a hands-on mother. The two have hardly any anything in common, but quickly become good friends. Several weeks later, Emily vanishes without a trace leaving her husband, Sean, Henry Golding, and Stephanie with a mystery on their hands. As they investigate what happened to Emily, they quickly realise they didn't know her as well as they thought.

A Simple Favour works because of the performances of all three leads. Anna Kendrick is fanatic as the awkward and naive Stephanie. She has tons of really funny moments and is very sweet, but even with a slight edge - the character and the performance is believable. Blake Lively is endlessly entertaining, extremely enigmatic, and unbelievably charismatic. It helps that I am a little bit in love with her. She's beautiful and seemingly lovely in real life! Henry Golding also oozes charisma and adds an unexpected amount of intrigue to the film. All three of them have excellent chemistry and provide, in my opinion, one of the best ensembles of the year. One of Paul Feig's gifts as a director is working with strong charismatic women, giving them space to whoop it up, work off one another, be co-creators. There's space in his approach, space left for behavior, humour, spontaneity.

The plot is really engaging and has seemingly endless twists and turns that leave you constantly wondering what is going to happen next and what is actually true. Each of these characters have secrets, each more shocking than the last, and there are some jaw-dropping moments throughout the film. Director Paul Feig does a great job of giving us his vision of this story. The direction is marvelous and stylish and wouldn't be nearly as good in a lesser director's hands. Unfortunately, the afore mentioned twists and turns overwhelm at times and turn the film into something it didn't intend to be - a parody of genre cinema. Granted, it does find its way back on track, but the journey isn't entirely smooth.

A Simple Favour is one of my favourite films of the year. It has excellent performances all around, a really engaging story and great direction. Interestingly, one of the strongest aspects of this film's success has been its marketing. I don't often interact with film campaigns but I could not avoid this one - the intrigue was there from the start!