A Simple Favour review: An updated version of Gone Girl with extra comic elements thrown in

Dir: Paul Feig; Starring: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding. Cert 15, 117 mins

“Mummy needs a drink” is a constant refrain in Paul Feig’s macabre and very entertaining thriller. Adapted from Darcey Bell’s novel, A Simple Favour is like an updated version of Gone Girl with extra comic elements thrown in. Feig combines flippant, off-beat humour with plot twists you would expect to find in the most most morbid and feverish film noir.

Its clash in storytelling styles is bracing and original. This is a film with as much bite as the gin-based martinis that its femme fatale Emily (Blake Lively) makes herself every afternoon the moment she gets home.

Lively’s character would give Rita Hayworth in Gilda a run for her money. Blue-eyed and with flowing blonde hair, she is as hardboiled and cynical as she is glamorous: a jaded business executive, working in PR in the fashion industry and very reluctantly rushing home in time to pick up her son Nicky from kindergarten.

When Nicky grumbles that she doesn’t let him have any fun, she baffles the little boy by telling him: “Not true. I let you tear my labia as you exited my body.”

In complete contrast to Emily is Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), a busybody single mom, always volunteering to help in the classroom. Stephanie uses what little time she has to run a vlog in which she shares tips on baking and homemaking.

Kendrick gives a delightful comic performance as the pert and prudish Stephanie. She has what she calls an “oopsy jar” into which anyone who swears is supposed to drop coins. Given that Emily speaks in nothing but expletives, the jar quickly becomes redundant. Emily and Stephanie are polar opposites but their kids are at school together and they become best friends.

Early on, the film feels like a full-blown comedy. Feig plays up Stephanie’s embarrassment and continual urge to apologise in the forthright Emily’s presence. Stephanie blushes at the sight of one of the main paintings in her friend’s home, a full-frontal nude portrait of Emily, with the pubic hair in the centre of the frame.

She can’t hide her dismay at her own lack of sophistication or her astonishment at the easy physical intimacy Emily shows with her handsome novelist husband Sean (Henry Golding, the prince charming from Crazy Rich Asians.)

Much of the story is told in flashback. Emily has mysteriously gone missing. Stephanie is using her vlog not just to share her latest recipes for cookies but to ask her viewers if they have any idea of her friend’s whereabouts.

The tone of the storytelling gradually begins to shift as the whimsical satire of the early scenes gives way to darker, more sinister themes. One of the main points here is that Kendrick’s Stephanie isn’t quite the little miss Bo-Peep that she seems.

Sexual and financial intrigue, death and betrayal are all thrown into the heady and potent mix. Director Feig even includes sly references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. As Stephanie becomes more and more obsessed with Emily, she begins to assume the missing woman’s identity.

Some of the jokes here are a little bit too knowing and self-conscious. “Are you trying to Diabolique me?” Stephanie asks at one stage in reference to the classic Clouzot thriller in which a woman is drawn into a murder plot that isn’t at all what it seems. (If Stephanie really was as ingenuous as the film implies, it seems unlikely that she would be steeped in French cinema of the 1950s – or even aware of the 1990s remake.)

Feig is best known for big, broad comedies like Bridesmaids and the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. In its weaker moments, A Simple Favour plays like a farcical skit on those boil-a-bunny erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the film benefits from its two bravura central performances.

It also manages to retain its humour without losing its unsettling and disorienting quality. Feig shows far more subtlety here than in most of his other movies but old habits die hard. The finale is wildly overblown and improbable – but at least it is fun.

'A Simple Favour' is in UK cinemas