Everything we know going into A Simple Favor suggests one of those Hitchcockian mysteries that blurs the lines between homage and emulation. Its premise and tone are right out of the Master of Suspense’s beginners’ playbook: Through a series of unfortunate choices or just plain bad luck, an average Joe or Jane, whom the audience projects themselves onto, gets sucked into a dangerous mystery that throws them completely out of their element and threatens their lives, leaving them with only their wits and survival instincts to get out of this madness unscathed.
In the case of A Simple Favor, what the audience should know is that, even though the screenplay by Jessica Sharzer, adapted from Darcey Bell’s novel, borrows some narrative cues from gloomier fare like Strangers on a Train and Vertigo, it’s a lighthearted mystery with a heaping helping of humor, more in tune with happy-go-lucky classics like North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief. Even though it’s not Hitch, Stanley Donen’s Charade is an obvious tonal influence.
Director Paul Feig immediately eases us into this mood of light intrigue through a Saul Bass-inspired title sequence full of sliding split screens and uniformly pleasant colors, aided by peppy ’60s-ish French pop to smoothe out the intensity of the film’s thriller elements. Feig is primarily known as a comedy director who has a knack for improvisational R-rated banter between neurotic, but confident, female characters, and in A Simple Favor those characters participate in in a respectably average missing person thriller/mystery. Bridesmaids does Gone Girl is a fairly intriguing selling point; perhaps the marketing should have focused on that.
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