‘Another Simple Favor’ Ending, Explained: Every Absurd Twist

Spoilers ahead for the ludicrous plot and ending of Another Simple Favor.

Enjoyment of the burgeoning Simple Favor franchise is predicated on two things: your ability to suspend disbelief for every new plot twist and your appreciation for Blake Lively in a suit. Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor, released in 2018 and adapted from the novel of the same name, relied heavily on Lively’s bold sartorial choices and the chemistry (at times overtly sapphic) between her and co-star Anna Kendrick. The beach-read thriller plot — in which Lively’s Emily fakes her own death by murdering her secret twin sister, forcing Kendrick’s mommy vlogger Stephanie to investigate — plays like a lighter (but also gayer!) Gone Girl. If the turns it takes can be hard to swallow, the game cast and Jessica Sharzer’s darkly funny script help the whole thing go down easy.

The long-awaited sequel Another Simple Favor retains much of the cast and crew — Laeta Kalogridis joins Sharzer on the screenplay, and Elizabeth Perkins replaces Jean Smart as Emily’s mother, Margaret — and transplants the story to the beautiful Italian island of Capri. Emily ended up in prison at the end of the first movie, but she’s been sprung from jail while her fancy new lawyers appeal her case, and she’s getting married to the rich and handsome Dante Versano (Michele Morrone). Naturally, she wants her best frenemy Stephanie as her maid of honor at the destination wedding. The basic setup is predictably nonsensical — the last time those two saw each other, Emily was trying to kill Stephanie — but the film manages to brush past any objections with surprising ease. “Just go with it,” Emily suggests.

Once in Capri, things go about as well as expected. Mother-in-law Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci) spitefully surprises Emily by inviting her estranged religious-nut mother, who brings along the more coherent Aunt Linda (Allison Janney). And though Emily’s (and Stephanie’s) ex Sean (Henry Golding) is just there by court order to accompany their son, Nicky (Ian Ho), he’s perpetually drunk and spewing vitriol. That’s to say nothing of all the people dropping dead — first Sean, whose murder is dismissed as an accident, and then Dante, shot to death on his wedding night. That Dante’s killing is immediately pinned on Stephanie isn’t really a twist (the in medias res scene that opens the film establishes as much), but it is where Another Simple Favor starts to go off the rails.

Ultimately, A Simple Favor is a deft balancing act between believability and enjoyability, where the silliest twist is acceptable as long as the audience is having a good time. Another Simple Favor stumbles while trying to walk that line. The plot beats that follow Dante’s death strain credulity past its breaking point, and the fun quickly wears thin. Let’s review exactly how it all goes wrong and where each plot twist falls on the believability-enjoyability scale.

The first film establishes that Emily (formerly Hope) and sister Faith had a third identical sibling, Charity, who died at birth. Naturally, Feig couldn’t resist the opportunity to have Lively play another character, so Another Simple Favor has Charity turn up alive to take Emily’s place. It’s Charity who shoots and kills Dante, though Aunt Linda is really pulling the strings. Stephanie catches on to the ruse fairly quickly, assuming that Charity has also killed Emily, but it’s a little hard to get anyone to take you seriously when you’ve been accused of murder and are rambling about a secret triplet.

Believability: 6/10. Charity’s ability to pull this off seems highly unlikely — does she also speak fluent Italian? — but to the movie’s credit, the existence of the third sister was established in the first film.

Enjoyability: 7/10. Even acknowledging the “been there, done that” aspect of yet another Blake Lively, Charity’s arrival is an entertaining development, particularly when Stephanie catches on.

To figure out how Charity is alive, Stephanie once again tries to pry information out of Margaret, whose semi-lucid ramblings give way to a flashback that shows what really happened. It was Linda who delivered the triplets, and who told Margaret that Charity was stillborn. Linda then spirited Charity away and raised her as her own. With some added intel from Detective Summerville (Bashir Salahuddin), we learn that Linda has been a very active con artist with a penchant for black-widow behavior — that is, marrying and then offing wealthy men — and that she’s forced Charity into a life as her accomplice, because no one ever suspects kids of being criminal masterminds.

Believability: 4/10. As Nicky points out in the first movie, nobody else looks like Blake Lively, so the idea that there was a third sibling who spent decades under the radar feels unlikely. Beyond that, Charity’s fractured mind (more on that below) makes it hard to imagine her being all that good at scamming.

Enjoyability: 5/10. While Allison Janney improves every movie she’s in, Linda is nowhere near as compelling a character as the rest of her family, and her backstory is relegated to an exposition dump.

No big surprise here: Emily wasn’t dispatched off-screen, as we learn when she rescues Stephanie in the nick of time. Convinced Stephanie murdered Dante, Portia kidnaps her and shoots her full of truth serum that mostly makes her very high. Stephanie doesn’t confess to a crime she had nothing to do with, but she’s also fairly useless, so Portia orders her killing before she departs. The mobsters are seconds away from killing Stephanie when Emily arrives and knocks them out. She and a still very high Emily are able to escape mostly unscathed.

Believability: 6/10. When Stephanie asks how Emily was able to get the jump on made men, Emily answers, “Prison, bitch,” which is basically good enough for me.

Enjoyability: 5/10. As delightful as it is to watch Emily kick mafiosi ass, Stephanie’s role in this story becomes more and more confounding the longer Another Simple Favor goes on. These movies work best when she and Emily are on a level playing field, and here, Stephanie is more damsel in distress.

Linda’s original plan wasn’t for Dante to die — she’d been blackmailing him and Emily over the truth of their relationship. Despite the sparks between them, Dante and Emily were never romantically involved. She was his beard, brought in to help cover up his love affair with Matteo Bartolo (Lorenzo de Moor), the son of a family engaged in a longstanding feud with the Versanos.

Believability: 7/10. Everyone in the Simple Favor universe is at least a little gay, so this twist makes as much sense as anything (even if the logistics are a bit squishy).

Enjoyability: 8/10. It’s also the film’s most effective twist, because it’s both a genuine surprise and something viewers highly attuned to queer subtext might have picked up on.

After Emily has rescued Stephanie, she reveals what happened when Charity took her place. Charity couldn’t bring herself to kill her sister, so she drugged Emily instead. Years of being locked away by Linda has given Charity a distinctly haunted-doll vibe — she’s creepy and childlike, and the more she talks, the clearer it is that she’s completely unhinged. While Emily is awake but unable to move, Charity takes it upon herself to give her sister pleasure in a horrifying act of incestuous rape. Stephanie, who has been labeled a “brother fucker” by Emily for, well, fucking her half-brother, calls Emily a “sister fucker,” which feels pretty glib under the circumstances.

Believability: 3/10. Nothing about Charity’s mental state and ghostly vibe feels remotely grounded in reality. Not to mention the fact that her ability to fool everyone but Stephanie into thinking she’s Emily would be contingent on her not being as out of her mind as the script suddenly requires her to be.

Enjoyability: 1/10. Although A Simple Favor pushed the envelope with Stephanie’s past indiscretion, the movie was able to turn it into a dark joke. Trying to do the same with a deeply disturbing act of sexual assault just doesn’t work.

In Another Simple Favor climax, Charity and Linda hold a drugged Nicky at gunpoint on a cliffside, forcing a confrontation with Emily and Stephanie. But while Charity is totally down with killing Stephanie, she still doesn’t want to lose the sister she’s finally reconnected with. Linda is prepared to take matters into her own hands when Nicky orchestrates a drone attack to incapacitate her, after which Charity pushes Linda off the cliff to her death.

Believability: 6/10. The drone is heavily featured early on, so it’s less drone ex machina and more Chekhov’s drone. The fact that Nicky is suddenly conscious enough to fly it right to its target is certainly questionable, though.

Enjoyability: 3/10. There’s a goofiness that permeates the entire scene, which feels like an easy out to an overly convoluted story.

Speaking of easy outs, Charity’s love for her sister is enough for her to pose as Emily and confess to all of the Capri murders: Sean, Dante, FBI agent Irene Walker (Taylor Ortega), Margaret, and Linda. (It was actually Linda who smothered Margaret with a pillow, but that’s neither here nor there.) Charity takes Emily’s place back in prison, while the real Emily goes on the run. She’s forced to leave Nicky behind, asking Stephanie to raise him on her behalf.

Believability: 3/10. It’s established that Nicky is the one person Emily really loves (well, except maybe Stephanie), so the idea that after all that she’d willingly abandon him rings false. Getting Charity to take her place helps her skirt accountability for her actions in the last movie, but now there are several more murders pinned on Emily, which doesn’t sound like a sensible plan in the long run.

Enjoyability: 2/10. Another Simple Favor’s denouement is as rushed as its climax.

In the film’s final scene, Portia confronts Emily, revealing that she knows everything, including that it wasn’t Emily who killed Dante. That doesn’t mean Emily is off the hook, however: Portia now knows her daughter-in-law has a very particular set of skills, and she also has the upper hand, since Emily is supposed to be safely locked up in prison. Besides, Emily has married into the Versano crime family, and that comes with certain responsibilities. In other words, she’ll have to do what Portia asks of her, starting with — you guessed it — “a simple favor.”

Believability: 4/10. What exactly does Portia know and how does she know it? Even being a well-connected Mafia matriarch doesn’t grant you complete omniscience.

Enjoyability: 5/10. Though Emily working for the mob is an intriguing notion, it’s really only dropped as a tease for a sequel that might never happen. We’ll have to see if Yet Another Simple Favor ever materializes — likely dependent on Feig and Sharzer figuring out how to introduce Emily’s secret quadruplet — to see if this twist pays off.