Wonderfully adapted, director Taylor Tate has replaced London life with the smoky haze of upstate NY, where everything and everyone has to be ideal.
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Directed by Tate Taylor (The Help), the film stars Emily Blunt as Rachel, a woman unravelling from the breakup of her marriage and her spiralling alcohol abuse. Every day the train stops in front of the same set of Hudson Valley homes.
“Blunt plays Rachel Watson, a 30-something divorcee struggling to accept the fact ex-husband Tom (The Leftovers’ Justin Theroux) is now married to Anna (Mission: Impossible’s Rebecca Ferguson), the woman he cheated on her with”.
But Rachel has formed a weird obsession: every day, from the train window, she glimpses scenes from the life of what looks to her like an enviably flawless couple: an unfeasibly gorgeous blonde woman and her handsome, devoted man (who turn out to be called Megan and Scott, played by Haley Bennett and Luke Evans).
“Girl” offers some genuine surprises; it intentionally stretches out into a spare, clear-eyed reflection on the effect of living the kind of life Rachel is living. She blacks out and wakes up the next morning covered in blood. I think she needed to be frightening.
It’s hard to say why “The Girl on the Train” doesn’t fully succeed.
By the time the book was coming out, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson was already turning in a draft of the screenplay.
Indeed, the movie is all about smoke and mirrors, deception and pretence, and like the book, will no doubt resonate with many in an age where people often live out a version of their life online.
Sometimes bad filmmaking can be pretty entertaining, but this movie has no sense of fun. It’s not a bad performance, but it’s a awful, laughable role.
And the actress is heartened by what she says is a growing number of complex roles being written for women these days. It’s a ridiculous moment. It’s a very real disease and its claws are in her. No thinking person would react this way! But it’s also a brittle and often nasty piece of work, a tricky puzzle-box noir with nearly no redeeming characters and a narrator so unreliable she makes Memento seem like a news brief.
But for a film crafted and manipulated to lead up towards the grand finale, it’s here where the biggest flaws remain, as a truly underwhelming final act which undoes much of the good work that preceded it.
As the public and police get involved in solving the disappearance, Rachel believes she needs to tell someone, anyone, about what she knows. Pale, mousy and raccoon-eyed, Blunt presents such a miserable, unlikeable portrait of the alcoholic Rachel that viewers may never want to get wasted ever again. She’s drunk, she’s causing chaos for everybody she touches.
The Girl on the Train is full of plot twists that will keep the audience on the edge of their seat. The flashbacks, jumps between character perspectives, and Rachel’s shards of hazy blackout memories are also more compelling when shown onscreen than on the page. But Taylor’s film, disappointingly, is nowhere near the league of either.
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Since she has poor decision-making skills and too much time on her hands, Rachel then takes it upon herself to act as detective in a case in which she’s the primary person of interest.
