Day 11 - 01/11/2019

  Starting out as what seems to be an interesting clash of personalities between the responsible and energetic parent versus the public-relations high class and outgoing mom, A Simple Favor twists your expectations of how this promising friendship will become. 

 

  Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), is driven by an overwhelming and quite inexplicable energy to take care of kids. When organizing a playdate with her son's friend, she is confronted with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), the polar opposite of her as a mother and as a person. To have the kids play together means they eventually have to interact as parents, which is where the fun starts. Altered by a couple martinis, Stephanie and Emily rapidly start to bond, revealing their motivations and expressing their personality. Stephanie is the one that gets the most out of this, realizing how she can be less uptight and still be a responsible mother. However, the surprise comes when Emily disappears, and what we thought was going to be a steady journey of how the extroverted teaches her ways to the introverted, becomes a question of what happened with her best friend. Sean Townsend (Henry Golding), her husband, is the immediate person to suspect, especially after taking Emily's life insurance right after her disappearance, and this is where Stephanie has to the matters to her own hands.

 

   As it turns out, both women have secrets of their own, which is how the viewer knowingly cheers for someone who acknowledges her errors in the past. The way the plot unfolds is surprising at every turn and the interactions between the main three characters are always up there in terms of screenplay and persona. Stephanie is a very loving person and Anna Kendrick plays her as naive without making her dumb. As the icing on the cake, there is nothing more memorable than Anna Kendrick rapping Ante Up, which deserves an honorable citation on its own. 

​

   Unfortunately, as every rose has its thorn, there are flaws in this movie, quite big actually. Though there are many twists, most are directed towards the middle section, making the last scene incredibly predictable as how it unveils. The twin sister trick is already outdated and as if it wasn't enough, Stephanie, the "brother-fucker", seems to not have learned at all with her greatest regret and decides to sleep with her best friend's husband during what's supposed to be her relative's mourning period, going completely out of character. 

​

   To sum it up, A Simple Favor is a great movie, perhaps one of the best of 2018 if it wasn't for the few questionable decisions cited above, reason I decide to give it a 7.6 out of 10 stones.