It’s Gone Girl, but with jokes thrown in
PAUL FEIG, a director known for making broad comedies with female protagonists, such as Bridesmaids (2011) and the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, has come up with something slightly different: a darkly comic thriller that feels as if it might have been conceived by someone watching 2014’s Gone Girl and thinking, ‘this could do with a few laughs’.
It stars the reliably engaging Anna Kendrick as Stephanie, a widowed mother of a young son who videoblogs about home-baking and is a somewhat nervous, frumpy paragon of single-parenthood.
One day at the school gate in suburban Connecticut, Stephanie encounters her polar opposite: willowy, gorgeous Emily (Blake Lively). She is a high-flying Manhattan fashion-company executive who would no sooner volunteer to make class cupcakes than wear Walmart dungarees, and can’t keep her hands off her dishy husband Sean, an English professor played by Henry Golding (currently making hearts flutter as the billionaire hunk in Crazy Rich Asians).
Despite their differences, the two women are soon friends, but then, after asking Stephanie to mind her son — the simple favour of the title — Emily goes missing. The police are called in, phone records are checked, lakes are dredged.
At first, Stephanie’s attempts to find her pal are restricted to appeals on her video-blog and putting up posters (‘I’ve never seen her pass up the chance to use a stapler,’ comments another parent, bitchily). But gradually she turns into a proper sleuth, a self- raising Miss Marple, and in discovering a whole baking-tray of uncomfortable truths about Emily, also kind of finds herself.
It’s very slickly plotted and written — by Jessica Sharzer, adapting Darcey Bell’s novel — and Lively rises to one of the best roles of her career; she is a terrific foil to Kendrick. Golding seems a little wooden, though it might just be his frightfully English accent. It’s a treat to see Rupert Friend in a cameo as a camp designer.
So all in all, there’s a great deal to enjoy. I confess I lost interest in the determinedly twisty plot about twothirds of the way through, but maybe that was just me. I know plenty of people who loved it all the way to the end.