Entertainment

The Music In 'A Simple Favor' Adds So Much To The Movie's Thrilling Mystery

A Simple Favor is the perfect movie to see if you loves stories of suburban housewives whose dark secrets starkly contrast their cookie-cutter appearance. And the soundtrack for A Simple Favor makes the movie even more enchanting, because the music in the Anna Kendrick/Blake Lively ilm is almost completely in French. Thanks to its soundtrack, A Simple Favor will make feel like you're a 1950s cat burglar a la Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, scaling the balcony of a vacation home overlooking the French Riviera. That's not exactly what happens in A Simple Favor, but the tone is pretty much the same.

Lionsgate released an official playlist with music from A Simple Favor on Spotify this summer, which you can listen to pump yourself up for the movie. A soundtrack with the original score from the film will go on sale on Sept. 14 (when the movie hits theaters) on Amazon and iTunes, but that doesn't include coy French songs like "Poisson Rouge" by Saint Privat — the track that plays in the trailer for A Simple Favor.

Since the music sounds like it belongs in an old school James Bond movie, it makes sense that Blake Lively's character, Emily (spoiler alert!) manipulates and swindles Kendrick's character, Stephanie, kind of how a Bond villain would. One of the songs from the movie is even called "Bonnie and Clyde," which hits the whole criminal-mastermind thing on the head.

After Emily becomes friends with Stephanie, she mysteriously disappears, causing Stephanie to join forces with Emily's husband, Sean (Henry Golding) to try to figure out where the heck her pal went. It's fun to watch Sean and Stephanie realize together that they didn't actually know much about their wife and friend, respectively, and it's doubly fun to see Kendrick play the overly trusting mommy vlogger that fell right into every trap that Emily laid for her.

When Bustle caught up with Lively on the red carpet for the premiere of A Simple Favor, the actor told us why she loved playing the devious mother to a young son, Nicky (Ian Ho). "Every villain is the hero of their own story, right? So she just knew why she did what she did, she did it with conviction, and she just did it unapologetically and I loved it," Lively said.

Her enigmatic character pairs so well with the movie's almost all-French soundtrack. Just as most viewers in the U.S. won't know what the songs in the soundtrack are about, they also won't know what Emily's plotting at most points of the movie. Take a listen to "Comment te dire adieu" by Françoise Hardy to get a sense of the soundtrack.

The other artists included on the playlist from A Simple Favor include French superstar Brigitte Bardot, Jacques Dutronc, Zaz, and rapper Orelsan. It's an all-around awesome soundtrack, and there's almost no doubt that after walking away from the movie theater, you'll immediately go down a Wikipedia hole to discover all the French music that you've possibly been missing out on.