Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively starrer A Simple Favor made quite the buzz when it first came out back in 2018. The film tells the story of two moms with completely different personalities who somehow become best friends before one of them disappears. The film is a mystery drama that has a few twists. The film definitely got a lot more attention because of the apparent beef between the two leading actresses, amplifying the “vibe” of their relationship in the film, but this is all alleged, and we can’t believe anything we see on the internet, especially when it’s to promote a movie such as this one. Stephanie and Emily are neighbors who become unlikely friends when their sons want a playdate. While Stephanie is a full-time mom, Emily works as the head of PR at a famous fashion label and gets barely any time with her son Nicky. Soon, the women grow really close, but one day, a few weeks into their budding friendship, Emily disappears. This leaves Stephanie trying to untangle the mystery while the world watches on.
Spoiler Alert
Why Does Emily Disappear?
Stephanie is a full-time mom and vlogger who makes “mom” videos. As a single mom, she makes ends meet with the payout from her late husband’s life insurance, but it seems her vlogs are doing pretty decent too. Stephanie’s brand becomes the “crime-solving mom” when she starts talking about Emily on her vlogs. This brings in a lot more subscribers. We don’t realize when Stephanie goes from calling Emily just a friend to her best friend, but it does happen some time after Emily’s been missing. Stephanie and Emily’s husband, Sean, get along pretty well because they’ve got the same interests. He’s supposed to be a writer, but he wrote just the one novel a decade ago. Stephanie knows that Sean and Emily had financial issues and wanted to sell the house because they were in debt. Stephanie ended up widowed because her husband thought their child was Stephanie’s half-brother’s (yikes). He took her half-brother, Chris, out on a drive to “talk it out,” only for both of them to die in a car crash. I think it wouldn’t be wrong to believe Miles is, in fact, Chris’s son.
Stephanie becomes almost like a nanny for Nicky, basically working for Sean for free, as Emily’s “best friend.” She thinks she needs to help out as much as possible, and so she does both mystery solving and looking after the kids. Using Stephanie’s clues, which she gets with the help of her mom and community, the police find Emily’s body at the bottom of a lake. Interestingly, soon after the funeral, Stephanie and Sean end up sleeping together. Now, this makes it seem like Stephanie wanted Emily’s life this whole time, and maybe she had something to do with her disappearance. But this is not the case.
Now, Stephanie moves in with Sean because he claims to love her, but then, when she empties Emily’s wardrobe, her clothes suddenly reappear. At the same time, Nicky, Emily’s son, keeps talking about having seen his mom, and Stephanie gets a little bit suspicious. She then learns from the detective in charge of the case that Sean has recently taken out a $4 million insurance policy in Emily’s name, which makes him look like the prime suspect in this story. But he isn’t a killer. In truth, Emily’s still alive, and she’s drawn up a whole plan, but what is this plan? And what really happened to Emily?
Is Stephanie the Victim?
Through this time, Stephanie starts to do her own digging and learns that Emily has a twin. This makes her realize that Emily is still alive and the body found at the bottom of the lake is probably her sister’s, so she ends up making a post about it and gives out a coded message to Emily to come find her at her own grave. As you can imagine, Emily does show up, and she tells Stephanie the whole story. Turns out they were triplets, but one died in the womb: Hope, Faith, and Charity (as Christian as they come). When they were teenagers, Faith would act out, hang out with boys, and then get in trouble with their dad. This got to be too much at one point, and Faith suggested they burn the house down and run away. The girls got matching tattoos and split up until the “fire cools down,” to meet again. However, Faith never showed up to their meeting, and Hope is left all alone.
Hope went on to make a living for herself by becoming a thieving con artist, i.e., Emily. She then had Nicky with Sean, and they were happy together until, one day, Faith finally called Hope again. Hope learned that Faith was a heroin addict and decided to drown her in the lake when she asked to go for a swim because there was no saving her. Emily is Hope. So she was the one who drowned her sister and then faked her own death.
Emily tells Stephanie that Faith drowned and she couldn’t find her anywhere, but Stephanie knows she’s lying. Emily has also met Sean by now, and she pretends that he knew her plan from the beginning, leaving Stephanie bitter about this whole situation. She even plays a voice recording where Sean admits that it was only sex with Stephanie, and he still loves Emily. Now Stephanie has to turn things around in her favo, so she devises another plan with Sean to get Emily to confess to her sister’s murder.
Emily comes back to the world with yet another lie, claiming that Sean’s an abusive husband and tried to get $4 million off of her death. Sean’s taken in, but when he returns (I guess since the investigation is ongoing), Emily returns home. While they’re talking, Stephanie shows up with a gun and then shoots Sean. At this point, it looks like Stephanie and Emily are in cahoots, but it’s just a plan to make her confess to killing her sister. Emily is one step ahead, though, because she knows exactly what Stephanie is trying to do, and she makes a false confession before calling them out and making Sean stand back up with the fake blood on his chest. However, she goes ahead and shoots him for real; fortunately, it’s in the shoulder. When she points the gun at Stephanie, the latter tries to stop her from making a grave mistake. It is then revealed that she’s got a tiny nanny cam on her shirt and has been live-streaming this whole situation. She caught Emily’s actual confession and also her shooting Sean.
At the end of A Simple Favor, Stephanie watches as Emily gets hit by a car, driven by Darren, one of the other school parents. He’s also part of the mom squad now. By the end of the film, Stephanie goes from being the nerdy single mom who gets bullied all the time to a crime-solving, one-million-subscriber mom. Emily gets arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing her father (in the fire) and her sister, as well as shooting Sean. Sean finally has a new book out called “The Oopsey Jar,” which becomes a bestseller. Stephanie, on the other hand, is now the proud host of a morning show produced by Conde Nast, but she also runs a cold case agency that has solved some 30 mysteries.
From the trailer of Another Simple Favor, we know that Emily doesn’t serve her entire sentence and gets parole 5 years after going to prison. Clearly, Stephanie is now highly successful and living the best life, but it’s all interrupted when Emily invites her to her wedding as the maid of honor. The question is, does she really want a maid of honor? Or is she getting revenge? We’ll have to wait and find out.
