Perfectly serviceable (if totally superficial and surface-level) mystery-lite affair that middle-aged white women will love, if the audience of my advance screening is anything to go by. 

Elevated immensely by the naturally engaging Daisy Edgar-Jones doing all the heavy lifting to make you invested in Kya’s plight, with strong supporting turns from Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr and David Strathairn as her few friends and empathetic allies. 

The film’s greatest weakness is it’s central murder mystery conceit — and the killer’s ‘reveal’ played so unsurprisingly and unremarkably (even for those like myself who’ve not read the novel, the answer is still literally there in the marketing tagline) — that it almost feels superfluous and like the filmmakers would have rather excised that subplot altogether, to just focus on the circumstances of Kya’s upbringing and early adulthood. To be honest, that might have made for a more cohesive and altogether better film.