Review of A Simple Favor, directed by Paul Feig

In the past month or so when writing this, in September 2024, I’ve had a lot of free time. I was waiting for my visa to India to come though, as it was taking a month, and I had just returned from an awesome summer where I was doing something every day in Busan, South Korea. It was torture in some ways, as I had nothing to do while I waited for this visa to arrive.

Now in my childhood home, with no car in suburbia, of course I was going to get bored. I’d quit my job as a film critic before I went to South Korea, and now I had no work really to do.

So what I did was I watched a ton of movies and caught up on the backlog of blog posts. Right before I had left I had nothing to do either, as I had graduated from my master’s degree program and had no jobs lined up before I went to Korea. A Simple Favor was one of the movies I watched before I headed off to Korea!

I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, so let’s get right into then, shall we?

Craft vlogger Stephanie gets a little too tangled up in her new unhinged friend’s life.

Our main character in this movie is Stephanie, who’s recently widowed and runs a vlog channel geared towards parents. She’s somewhat popular in her niche of recipes and crafts, but in her regular day to day life, she meets another mom: Emily Nelson. Emily seems to have it all together, as she’s a PR director and married to a university professor.

However, as the two go out for martinis, they confess their secrets to each other. Stephanie once had sex with her half-brother, and Emily doesn’t like how her husband isn’t successful and that they don’t really have money. Soon after, Emily heads off to London and asks Stephanie to watch her son.

But as Stephanie is babysitting, Emily doesn’t return any calls. Her boss, when called, says she’s in Miami, and not London, and Stephanie decides to tell Sean. He calls the police, and Stephanie begins making missing person posters.

The police investigate, and it turns out Emily never went to Miami. They found a drowned body in a lake that matches hers in Michigan, so everyone just goes with the fact she is dead. United by grief, Sean and Stephanie begin a relationship, but Stephanie begins to suspect him when she finds out the body had drugs in their system and Sean took out a life insurance policy recently.

Then Stephanie gets a message from Emily about her confession at the beginning of the movie, and then she has a traumatic flashback. Turns out the car crash that killed her half-brother and husband might not have been an accident, but here we are.

Stephanie continues her own digging into Emily, and discovers that she had a sister named Faith. Emily was a part of a family where she, along with her sister, burned down the house. They disappeared after killing their father with the arson, and Emily rebuilt her life from there. Her sister had disappeared completely, but turned up asking Emily for money lest she reveal to the police what they did.

Turns out Emily staged her own death and drowned her sister, which is interesting, but then she pops up to Sean and says she wants the insurance money. Stephanie then goes out to meet her, and Emily explains what she heard is true. She’s also a little more than pissed that Sean got together with Stephanie, and the two conspire to lure Sean into a trap to frame him for Faith’s death.

They do that, but he is released on bail. Stephanie then plots with him to lure Emily into a situation where she confesses as they have hidden microphones. Emily realizes what happens and turns the mics off, confesses, and then shoots Sean. As she gets ready to shoot Stephanie, she reveals that she had her vlog live streaming the entire time.

Emily tries to flee, but a guy hits her with his car. She’s arrested and gets 20 years in prison. Sean becomes successful, and Stephanie is a successful vlogger and now a part-time detective.

Overall Thoughts

This isn’t the greatest movie in the world, but it certainly is entertaining. Some of the situations with have you shaking your head and wondering how we got here, but I thought it was fairly compelling throughout its run time.

I honestly wish I had more to say than that. In these reviews I typically do, but I found this movie simply to be fun and entertaining. Some movies in the world exist in that little vacuum, and that’s alright. They don’t need to be high art, just entertaining.

So that’s all I have to say! Go watch this one if you’re interested and want something to watch on a Friday night out of boredom.

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