Centering on the mysterious disappearance of a young mother from her small town, Paul Feig’s new film A Simple Favor joins a genre of movies about women that up and disappear over night.

In the opening minutes of A Simple Favor, type-A mommy vlogger Stephanie, played by Anna Kendrick, tells the audience about the disappearance of her best friend Emily. With tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat, she recounts for us how the two women became friends and how Emily, after calling Stephanie one morning asking for a simple favor, disappeared into thin air.

Thus begins the utterly bizarre and unpredictable two-hour ride that is A Simple Favor. It’s the kind of movie that can be fun to watch, so long as you detach yourself from any expectations that it might offer a coherent narrative, good writing, or strong performances; A Simple Favor has none of these and yet remains fascinating to watch.

A Simple Favor walks a thin, almost indiscernible line between being a seriously bad movie and a seriously funny one; you might argue that the movie seeks to satirize the genre of movies that also center on a woman’s disappearance — in fact, I almost need the movie to be a satire to justify how remarkably stupid it is.

But regardless of the movie’s quality, A Simple Favor foregrounds the missing person narrative as a way of capturing and maintaining the audience’s interest. However, the disappearance in A Simple Favor is not just any missing persons case. Spoilers to follow…

Unlike the familiar missing person narrative that we see in TV and movies all the time, Emily’s disappearance in A Simple Favor is not the result of murder or some tragic accident — it’s intentional. Emily disappears because she chooses to.

As such, this is not a movie about disappearance or murder, but rather about a woman who uses her strength and intellect to completely upend and change the course of her life, regardless of the consequences or the people that may be affected.

This is a narrative that, even in a movie as aggressively banal as A Simple Favor, continually makes for really compelling movies.

Just this year, Gemini contained a much similar story. In the movie, Heather, a popular movie star, turns up murdered and her best-friend-forward-slash-personal-assistant Jill sets out to find out what happened to her. As Jill digs deep to find who killed Heather, she discovers that she might never have been murdered at all.

Sure, Gemini lures its audience in with the promise of a murder mystery, but the movie is ultimately far more about the pressures of fame and friendship, identity and self-preservation. To call Gemini a crime movie is to ignore the film’s clear focus on the relationship between Jill and Heather; after all, the movie starts off as a kind of hangout movie as Jill and Heather spend the night together.

David Fincher’s 2014 film Gone Girl also used a similar narrative to the ones seen more recently in Gemini and A Simple Favor. If you’re like me, you agree that Gone Girl is the quintessential movie about a woman that makes herself disappear.

Starring Rosamund Pike as iconic hero/villain Amy Elliot Dunne, Gone Girl begins as a by-the-book missing persons case that turns to a murder case that then transforms into a whole new beast: the story of a woman that “gone girls” herself and sets up her lazy, no-good, cheating husband for murder. The movie feels more akin to a Shakespearean tragedy than a crime thriller and it’s all the better for it.

What’s so interesting about these movies looked at side by side is how different they are, despite the obvious similarities. Sure, they’re all movies that prominently feature women who go missing on purpose, but that’s really not what these movies are about.

A Simple Favor is…well, it tries to be a satire of its genre, but it does manage to say something about friendships and how fraught they can be given how little we know about one another.

On the other hand, Gemini is a subdued neo-noir that digs into the consequences of fame. Meanwhile, Gone Girl is a sort of feminist commentary on or twisted parable about marriage.

Regardless of their similarities and differences, all three movies put women’s voices and experiences at the forefront in a way that is not just entertaining, but compelling.

Of course, women have always disappeared in movies. It’s not hyperbolic to say that women have been used by movies, pawns meant to be sacrificed in order to further someone else’s story. Look to films like L’Avventura and Picnic at Hanging Rock where women disappear without a trace. These movies never reveal where they went or what happened to them. Instead, these are stories about the people left behind, delving into their emotional responses. In these films, the women that disappear are elevated to a sort of mythical level; not real, but still deeply felt by those in the movie.

Other movies like About Elly or The Vanishing hold off on revealing what happened to the women until the end of the movie, using their demise as a sort of shoe drop to trigger an emotional response from the audience. Then there are movies like Brick and Prisoners that shape the entire narrative around one woman’s disappearance, but are really about the men trying to find them.

What feels so exciting and new about movies like A Simple Favor is the way they refocus the story on the woman who chooses to disappear. Unlike other movies that use a woman’s disappearance as the impetus for someone else’s tragedy or grief, movies like Gemini and Gone Girl are first and foremost about the women that leave everything behind. These movies make it clear that the men are not the focus of the story, but in fact a reason for why our protagonist would disappear in the first place.

There’s something empowering about a narrative that focuses on a woman exercising her freedom — both freedom from fear and freedom to live on her own terms. In this way, these movies articulate — to varying degrees — a message of empowerment; that women should act with the same autonomy that men have been afforded, both in fiction and in reality, for as long as we’ve been telling stories. This is a compelling new genre and one I hope we see a lot more of.