THE problem with train rides is that you just can’t stop them anywhere when you want to. It’s the same thing is with the film The Girl on the Train. There is an even greater problem, an internal one: the girl on the train always makes you feel she wants to stop the train. But she can’t, of course. She relies on the speed or slowness of the train that when it passes by the houses along the tracks, she can only look at them, appreciate them as the train passes by.
As with all thrillers, psychological or otherwise, the fun is when we start to feel we aren’t in control of the narrative about something that’s unfolding. When the plot, however, takes on a route we don’t like anymore, then the lack of control, exciting at the onset, becomes a deathly terrifying experience.
This doesn’t mean the film is not good. I think The Girl on the Train is a fabulous work, the kind of film that engages you because the characters pull you into their respective lives. The first one hour of the film is a series of one seductive event after another.
Three women are tracked by the film. There is Rachel, an alcoholic who passes by homes that she likes. One of them is her former home, now lived in by another woman, Anna, who’s now married to Tom, Rachel’s ex-husband.
As Rachel travels each day to New York, she sees her home and thinks if Anna knows that she, Rachel, has chosen all those things in the house. Rachel also sees this other house, one occupied by another couple, Megan and Scott.
The lives of these women will oddly and dangerously intersect. Rachel, for one, is shown becoming obsessed with her former husband and the life he leads now with Anna. The couple has a baby, a situation which troubles Rachel because she sees her not having a baby as the reason her husband left her. Rachel visits Anna and, while the latter is asleep, picks up the baby. And takes it out of the house. The scenario is eerie, as Rachel is shown cuddling the baby in the mist of day.
Megan works as nanny to Anna’s baby, an arrangement we soon will discover has a troubling agenda. Megan one day informs Anna she’s had enough of her work as nanny.
The Girl on the Train has an unusual appeal to the audience. From the start, it shows flawed and failed women. In critical situations, women are pitted against women. Anna, it seems, makes things difficult for Megan. Rachel suffers because a woman has stolen her home. The men, on the other hand, are weak or detached personas. Megan sees a psychiatrist, Dr. Kamal Abdic—by the name, a foreigner. Megan notices his accent. Scott Hipwell seems like an emotionally bruised man. Scott, the only one who, on the surface, functions a male, as a husband, would soon offer us a different personality.
When one of the women is found dead and one of the men becomes suspect, the film starts to flip and flop. It flounders and loses its grit. It becomes a whodunit, one of those films again.
The strength and charm of the film rest on the interlocking tales of three women. Even when there is barely a tenuous thread connecting them and their men, the story excites us. We become a person “in the train”, looking out and wishing we could stop and look inside those houses. We all want to be Rachel obsessing about the homes and the people she sees on the porch or around bonfires. What do these men and women do? What do they tell each other about life and each other? The film makes us voyeurs, profilers and judges. It is a privileged position but one that stays only for a short time.
As Tom, Justin Theroux makes full use of his handsome features to create a mean man. Luke Evans is hardly recognizable here as Scott. He is sensual but one can conclude this man is one so unsure of himself, women would leave him anytime. Edgar Ramirez as the psychiatrist is a very strong presence.
There is, however, a new woman in my (critic’s) life—and that woman is Emily Blunt. As the alcoholic, Blunt deepens the traditional role of “unreliable narrator”. She has blackouts and, thus, forgets about what happens when she is all soused-up. Despite this disability, Blunt humanizes her character by imbuing it, during the first scenes, with a very deep longing and sadness for home. She looks longingly at these homes along the tracks because, as we will find out later, she does not have a home anymore. Her alcoholic ways are done with such original ease. She is not woozy or all too drunk but we can see there is something unstable about her. When Blunt looks into the camera, one is reminded of a younger, perhaps more classically beautiful Karen Black.
The film also stars Haley Bennett as Megan and Rebecca Ferguson as Anna.
The Girl on the Train is based on the best-selling novel of Paula Hawkins of the same title. The screenplay is written by Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Tate Taylor.
The film is from DreamWorks and released by Universal Pictures.