Film: 'A Simple Favo(u)r'

This is more like it! It's a cracker!
I've a keen liking for quirky films and this is full of quirks, especially in the opening scenes as well as those concluding. In between it gets quite serious-strange and unsettling. 

Filmed in Ontario (standing in for U.S.A. - I think), Anna Kendrick is a widowed mum of a six-year old son who meets the stuck-up, bristling with self-assuredness, mother (Blake Lively) of another boy in the same class, who invites her to her home where she meets the husband (Henry Golding), a one-hit-wonder writer.  The two women, through their sons' close friendship, themselves form an attachment which quickly embraces an intimacy - at least verbally - exchanging secrets and confidentialities. Then, out of the blue, while Kendrick is waiting for Lively to collect her son after school, she vanishes. Finding out that she's gone to Miami "for a few days" which her husband apparently didn't know about, though he gives the impression that she's done similar disappearing tricks before with no warning. 
To say much more is difficult as it would spoil the many twists and turns (twists within twists), quite enough to leave one giddy - yet totally intrigued as to what actually is going on and how it's going to develop.

The script is sharp and smart throughout, the story inventive - well, apart from one moment when someone 'known' to be dead re-appears, the explanation for which harks back to those films of old when what seems impossible is too neatly disposed of by resorting to an unlikely reveal which we hadn't known until then. But this happens halfway through the film and once accepted, the film carries on with its maze of revelations, so it didn't worry me too much.

The extended 'solution' scenes at the end, which attempt to tie up the loose ends, I must confess I couldn't follow entirely. However, it didn't matter as the theatricality of the situation the characters find themselves in carries it all through to a most satisfying climax.

Director Paul Feig, probably best known for the entertaining 'Bridesmaids' (2011), does sterling work with this tale. for which he surely owes a great debt of gratitude to Jessica Sharzer for the highly pointed screenplay, based on novel by Darcey Bell.  

I was starting to wonder when I would see another good, 'quality' film again. Why, it's been a full two weeks! Now this one comes along and I must say it fitted the bill very nicely, thank you.............7.5.

(IMDb............7.2 / Rott. Toms..........7.0 )