The Girl on the Train review

Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins best-selling crime novel “The Girl on the Train” owes much of its intended style and tone to David Fincher’s much more interesting take on Airport pulp “Gone Girl,” but unlike that film, which took many risks and was able to carefully balance icy sensuality with pitch-black cynicism, this sleepy thriller never quite marries its objectives between the narrative, the themes and its genre conventions.  Given all of these obvious shortcomings, lead actress Emily Blunt still manages ride the bumbling vehicle in a way that, at the very least, allows her to showcase her dramatic range.

The story focuses on the broken life and the fractured memories of Blunt’s character Rachel. Erin Cressenda Wilson’s adaptation of Hawkins’ novel decides to tells the story in a similarly non-linear way, emulating Rachel’s foggy recollection of the past events within the plot. The screenplay purposely withholds information or gives us false memories to obscure the later reveals. What we know early on is that Rachel is a hard-drinking alcoholic still reeling from a divorce with a man named Tom (Justin Theroux), who’s recently remarried and had a child with his younger mistress Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Unable to get over their failed marriage and her inability to bear a child for her former husband, Rachel rides a train past their old home every day to see the progression of Tom and Anna’s new life. One day while pining for her past she witnesses her former neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) kissing a strange man on an outdoor balcony, only a few days before Megan herself goes missing. This makes a Rachel a lead suspect because of her history with being seen around her ex’s property uninvited. In getting closer to Megan’s worried and cuckholded husband (Luke Evans) this event also invigorates Rachel into solving the case to both exonerate her and to bring closure to her messy past.

This movie has some very interesting things to say about women’s relationship with their domestic lives, in terms of what they’re ‘supposed’ to be as a wife, a lover, a fantasy, a mother and modern careerist. The film posits that most of these identities are unfairly defined by the expectations of men and that a woman’s fully formed identity and a true sense of absolution can only be achieved by realizing their life outside of the confines of a traditional marital paradigm. Blunt and the other leads in the cast do well to underline these themes with their performances and they help to carry the feature through its many weighty scenes, but the slowly accumulating structure of the plot never truly satisfies as the brooding whodunit mystery it wants (and needs) to be.

This unconventional take on the neurotic detective, the unreliable narrator and the Hitchcockian wrong-(wo)man protagonist should have crackled more than Taylor’s lilting direction allows for. Taylor borrows style from many sources but never synthesizes them in a way that supports the narrative elements or its boiler-plate genre surprises. What could have been a dark satire about the American domestic fairytale—the angle Fincher’s “Gone Girl” already mastered—or what could have been a suburban “Silence of the Lambs” feminist mystery ends up being a suffocated character study that sacrificing its pop sensibilities for an air of safe and unearned prestige.

For a Lifetime movie writ large “The Girl on the Train” has moments and individual scenes that highlights nuances performances, as well as some thoughtful set design, but the film is so concerned with its rainy tone and its structural juggling that it’s never in conversation with the audience. The result is a somewhat flat and edgeless piece of fast-food filmmaking that can’t sell the shocking reveals it depends on.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2016

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