‘The Girl On The Train’ Review: Welcome To The Sexiest, Scariest Suburb In America

When you go to see The Girl On The Train — which you will, we know this — people will ask you whether you’ve read the book or not, and not just because people who are able to keep up with every new zeitgeist-y book are impressive. (I dream of one day being a person like that, and will always blame the abundance of open internet tabs on my computer for this particular shortcoming.)

The book, by Paula Hawkins, was widely praised as being the ‘book that everyone’s talking about’ when it came out last year, a title that can always be ascertained by how well represented it is in airport bookshops (I’ve seen a lot of copies of Amy Schumer’s book and A Little Life in airports in the last month, so I guess they’re the new, new books?). Because of this, you’ll already know that the story is a sexy thriller which aims to startle you through startling narrative twists; even if you don’t actually know what it’s about.

The poster and trailer for The Girl On The Train likewise reminds you that it’s the tale that “shocked the world”. It’s hard when you already know this about a story, because from the get go your brain is searching for the thing that is meant to shock you, keeping track of ambiguous moments that your thoughts usually glaze over for convenience because that might be the moment that you look back on and say: “Of course!” This is unavoidable.

If you’ve read the book, you know the twists already, so you just have to pray that they are depicted with enough goosebump-y gusto that they can chill you again. Because of the tyranny of spoiler culture I can’t really get into that, but having read it, I can say that the third act will still make you jump — even if the very end kind of felt like the diet version of really tasty soft drink. Cool, moving on.

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Who Is This ‘Girl’ Anyway?

Emily Blunt is The Girl! Rachel is a depressed and irresponsible Englishwoman In New York, whose ennui is further exacerbated by the fact that every day on her train commute she rides past the old, ridiculously lavish home she used to share with her ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux and his eyebrows).

Tom now shares the house with his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and their baby daughter. Tom was having an affair with Anna during he and Rachel’s marriage, which is a deep hurt that Rachel uses to justify being a not-so-functioning alcoholic, stalking them on Facebook and texting Tom a bunch.

Rachel’s melancholy is increased by her eye-stalking of a couple she sees every day while riding the train, who live a couple of houses away from Anna and Tom. Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans) are incredibly good looking and always seem to be draped in cashmere blankets and laughing in front of an open fire, glasses of shiraz balanced in their manicured hands. That is, when they’re not energetically having sex against every full-length, train-facing window in the house. What a sexy suburb!

Rachel jealously dreams of having a simple and passionate love like theirs and fantasises about what their life might be like– until when on one of her train rides she sees Megan kissing another man, and descends into a rage-induced bender that sees her blackout for hours. This is when the creepiness starts.

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In Defence Of Emily Blunt.

Before the film had even come out, fans were upset about the story’s move from England to America (I have to admit, this bothered me slightly too. How do they all afford to live in houses that big in New York!?) and the fact that Rachel is meant to be a puffy, sweaty person whose clothes are too-tight and who always feels perpetually flushed and, you know, Emily Blunt is not that.

The idea that Emily Blunt seems too-together to play Rachel because she’s pretty and slender, is crazy to me. Apart from the fact that she’s really, really good in this part, I kind of liked that this desperate, raging-alcoholic who slurs at strangers on public transport and sips plastic bottles of vodka in the park, looked like a chic and sophisticated woman. Alcoholics are usually portrayed on screen as abusive husbands in plaid shirts, or when they’re women — which is rare — as white trash 8 Mile mums and older Lucille Bluth-type characters whose drinking problems are played for laughs.

Emily Blunt as Rachel is the invisible alcoholic. The one who can afford to drink martinis in fancy Manhattan bars, squeal with other drunk women in public bathrooms and pour herself a glass of wine when she wants the courage to do some self destructive social media-ing. We don’t often see alcoholism in young women presented in this way in film. I would have liked to see more of it, particularly the strain it caused her room mate, Cathy (Laura Prepon).

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So Why Is Everyone Saying It’s Like Gone Girl When It Doesn’t Really Sound Like Gone Girl?

The Girl On The Train as a book and a film has been actively marketed as ‘this year’s Gone Girl‘ despite there not being that many narrative similarities between the two, other than them both being characterised as psychological thrillers that take place (bum bahhhh) in the home. Like where you live! One thing that they have in common is that like Gone Girl‘s Amy, Megan is presented as a beautiful and serene wife on the outside, who yearns for excitement and change. Pretty, affluent women being dissatisfied with their lot is evidently still a very edgy and baffling concept for audiences.

Director Tate Taylor makes pretty heavy allusions to Gone Girl throughout the film (I think he may have even used a similar font in the title cards?) which is a shame because Tate Taylor is not as good a director as David Fincher and in any case, that movie already exists. Taylor was praised for giving The Help‘s film adaptation more depth — that’s how shallow the book was, apparently — but in this film he seems more concerned with mimicking Gone Girl‘s chilling mood than creating fresh suspense.

Like the book, the film switches between the perspectives of Rachel, Anna and Megan and even having read the book I was sometimes confused by the timeline. If we’re going to compare it to Gone Girl, the only way that The Girl On The Train is truly let down is in its structure, which I don’t think succeeds in steadily raising the stakes.

There is less time for Rachel to ponder the tiny clues that will reveal what happened during her missing hours. This could just be an unavoidable problem of adapting the book to the screen, but the conclusion seems a lot more obvious and logical than I thought it would be. It’s a shame, because one of the most stressful and exciting things about The Girl On The Train is Rachel trying to figure out how to regain her memory while deeply distrusting those around her and trusting herself even less. The Rachel in the film is a lot more motivated and the events move quickly.

I kind of found myself wishing that The Girl On The Train hadn’t tried to be ‘slow-burning-prestige-mystery-in-the-style–of-Fincher’ and had just given into its pulp-y suspense and gone full ’90s thriller. I didn’t expect this movie to present Rachel as a kind of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window; flawed, but desperate to uncover a wrong they have witnessed from a safe perch. Rachel is genuinely nutty and does some real messed up things! Even her reasons for investigating an incident that occurred during her blackout is self-serving. I found it strange that the film leaves her bereft of responsibility for some extremely questionable decisions.

You may not be on the edge of your seat, but you’ll never have a moment of boredom. It’s not Gone Girl, but man, I wish it hadn’t tried to be.

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The Girl On The Train is out now.