"A Simple Favor": The director of the film "The Heat" filmed a comedy feminist thriller with a double bottom.

The film tells about two heroines: one renders the other a simple service, after which she disappears without a trace. I think that Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively played their best roles here, and the film, despite its inconspicuous title, is charming.

It is unlikely that A Simple Favor will have record-breaking fees, which is a great pity: the film is an outstanding of its kind and certainly worthy of attention. Alas, both artists are not well known to us - Anna Kendrick's “simple one” (“Up In the Air”, “Twilight”), and Blake Lively “emansipe” (“Cafe Society”, “The Shallows”) who played here, probably the most expressive and unusual of their roles.

It is about him chic blonde, a spokeswoman for the New York fashion house Emily (Lively), asks the naive brunette housewife, leading the video blog "For Mommies" Stephanie (Kendrick). Their sons go to the same school, and Emily is delayed at work - why should not Stephanie look after the children? However, in the evening, Emily is not announced, her phone is turned off, and the secretary says that she drove off for a week in Miami. When Emily's husband, a promising young writer Sean (Henry Golding), returns from a forced trip to England (mother broke her leg), she and Stephanie go to the police and she starts looking for the missing mommy. A charming comedy of manners dramatically turns into an oppressive formidable thriller in the spirit of “Gone Girl” - and with similar paradoxical surprises, without losing its humor and lightheartedness in a magical way.

I do not want to kill the pleasure of the film with spoilers: it is made very well, but still traditional, except for truly extraordinary acting, so that sharp turns of intrigue, told in a fascinating and ingenious way, remain the main virtue of A Simple Favor. We will manage with hints. Each of the two heroines will find the second bottom, and a little later - the third and fourth. The film successfully continues the endless series of thrillers about a blonde and a brunette with relying lesbian overtones, rivalry and doubles. Included in the story line is a mandatory component of the love triangle, and children's injuries, and, of course, skeletons in the closet. Adyulter case will not do - comes to incest and even murder. American critics will recall Hitchcock and Fincher, and European critics will recall Ozone, Polanski and directly quoted in the film by Henri-Georges Clouzot. It is not for nothing that the French hit of the 1950s and 1960s, the very years when Les Diaboliques were filmed, serves as a soundtrack to this seemingly pure American story.

Directed by Paul Feig - the central figure of a new wave of Hollywood feminism, wittingly and aptly interpreting from film to film the place of women in modern society and the traditional system of filmmakers. His belated (Feig came to the big movie from the TV series) Bridesmaids full-length debut was a brilliant response to obscene "male" comedy about the loss of innocence. “The Heat” dealt with the police Buddy Movie, “Spy” with the James Bond myth, and “Ghostbusters” were the female traverse of the 1980s iconic franchise. That picture did not seem quite successful; the charm of the original source Fig did not outdid. In A Simple Favor, he returns to the more familiar modern soil and is fully rehabilitated.