There are films that, like a splashy dinner party hosted between power surges, seem to teeter joyfully on the brink of self-immolation: too bright, too eager, altogether too much. A Simple Favor, Paul Feig’s giddy, knowing leap into nonsensical noir (with quotation marks around both “noir” and “knowing”), belongs to that breed. One watches it, if one watches it at all, and I admit I was blissfully unaware of its existence until the 2025 sequel crept up like a podcast auto-play, and feels at once the tug of modern anxieties and the shriek of a fashionista’s ringtone: Are we to be shocked, amused, or both at these women’s deadly games of friendship and deception?
At its (confected, devious) core is Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick, as professionally adorable as a puppy you suspect is hiding the TV remote under your pillow), a widowed mommy-vlogger whose life, artisanal snacks, yawning blog, begs for narrative sabotage. Enter Emily Nelson, Blake Lively with a platinum helmet of hair and the slink of a cobra in stilettoes, and every stereotype of “dangerous best friend” tucked provocatively into her monogrammed waistband. The two strike up a friendship with all the conviction of strangers failing an improv exercise, but this is Feig's world: motivations are as swappable as handbags, and intimacy is only a Martini and skeleton away.
If the central relationship never quite rings true, it's because Feig (with a script by Jessica Sharzer, who must have written at least three endings for every act) isn’t interested in plausibility, only in what passes for it if you spin fast enough and throw in enough fake-outs, reversals, and unspeakable pasts. There are so many twists that suspense gives way to a kind of giddy exhaustion; you stop asking “Who did it?” and start wondering “Is anyone here even real?” Yet, in a perverse way, it’s entertaining, like finding a $300 scarf on sale at Target, and discovering it’s laced with poppers.
Kendrick, to her infinite credit, almost makes Stephanie’s transformation from mouse to suburban Marple seem emotionally plausible, her twitchy pluck manages to poke heart through the obvious blueprint. But it’s Lively who owns this movie, gliding through every scene in pantsuits sharper than any line of dialogue (and occasionally wielding a silver skull cane with a flair that would make Dietrich, or a Bond villain, blush). The supporting men, I hesitate to call them characters, are approximations, necessary ballast for the women’s pas de deux; Henry Golding’s Sean is handsome, baffled, and as emotionally detailed as a premium scented candle.
The fun, such as it is, lies in the genre gymnastics. Feig, never a stranger to comic self-commentary, laces his thriller with a playful, almost burlesque sense of its own ridiculousness. When the soundtrack swerves into French pop or a mommy-bake-off devolves into bloodshed, you sense the director giggling just behind the camera, he's in on the joke, offering winks to those in the audience attuned to camp. The mood swings so wildly that you think the projectionist has been swapping out reels at random, yet this incoherence becomes, paradoxically, part of the intrigue. Is this murder as performance art, or PTA meeting gone psychotic?
There are, hidden inside the baggy script and shrill excess, a few moments that genuinely prickle, a perfect umbrella shot here, a haunted childhood flash there, little cinematic bonbons that reveal Feig’s still-functioning sweet tooth for visual surprise. But these are thrown into a swirl of colors and tones that never quite resolve. Sometimes, you wish the film would slow down, help us care, just for a moment, about the fact of betrayal, the cost of obsession, the ache of lost friendship. Instead, it prefers to pirouette.
Comparisons to Gone Girl are inevitable: both wish to excavate the rot beneath upper-middle-class rituals, both spin out tales of female duplicity with tongues in cheek and knives behind backs. But Fincher’s film, for all its pulpy excess, loved the psychological jungle; Feig’s is satisfied with a funhouse mirror version, dazzling, disposable, and content to wink at the audience as it spins away.
If you’re here for the performances (and why not?), you’ll have a wickedly good time. If you’re after coherence or catharsis, well, there’s always the next episode of that mommy vlog.
