Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is a single mum, recently widowed, who fills her time with a crafting video-blog, demonstrating decoupage and baking tips to a teensy number of subscribers, plus volunteering over-enthusiastically at her son’s school. When she meets working mum Emily (Blake Lively) and is brought along on a playdate between their sons, she’s impressed by the immaculately dressed, effortlessly cool career woman. But when she does a favour keeping Emily’s son overnight while Emily works late, and Emily later goes missing, things begin to career out of control. Investigating what happened to her friend gets Stephanie into more and more trouble, mixing with fashonistas, the police and Emily’s very attractive husband.
This sorta falls into the middle zone of “Gone Girl” knockoffs – it’s better than “Girl on the Train” but not as good as the original – but it does have a nice gentle whimsy to its distinctly female take on a crime story. If this isn’t really a solve-it-yourself story (there’s at least one twist which comes straight from the desperate writer’s toolkit), it makes up for it with strong casting (Kendrick is a delightfully daggy heroine and Lively drips both contempt and poise as the cooler-than-everybody Emily, in a series of spectacularly fashionable outfits, including one suit that really shouldn’t be containing her boobs) and a nice sense of whimsy and general lightness.
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