The Girl on the Train

Great acting can’t save a film like this, but trust me they tried.

The Girl on the Train, adapted from the novel of the same name, follows Rachel (Emily Blunt), a self-destructive drunk as she tries to recall the details of a night that she cannot remember. Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett), a woman that Rachel essentially spies on and fantasizes about from the train car she rides every day, has gone missing and Rachel, having been spotted around the area at the time, is slowly starting to realize that she might have done something terrible to this missing woman. Throw in a few people surrounding Megan that might also have an agenda against her, and the list of suspects begins to grow as the police fail to find any evidence as to where Megan has gone. Before we know it, Rachel is embroiled in her own quest to clear herself of any wrongdoing, but as the plot thickens and more information comes to light, can Rachel really trust her own memories to help figure out what happened, and worse yet, can she trust herself to stay sober long enough to get to the bottom of Megan’s disappearance and hopefully clear her name in the process?

In a way, this is one of the most well acted films I’ve seen this year, but with a script that doesn’t do the cast any favors, it’s a tough film to rate as a whole. As Rachel, Emily Blunt is a broken and damaged individual. Every scene she’s in is both heartbreaking and frustrating in the way that she portrays this clearly deranged person who can’t seem to keep her shit together. She’s always drunk, always reminiscing and pining for a past she no longer has, and with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) having moved on with his life in the very same house they used to share, Rachel is scraping the bottom of the emotional barrel in more ways than one. It’s really a fascinating performance, and an ugly one at that, so the fact that Blunt is able take the material she has to work with (which most certainly isn’t the best), and deliver in a way few others could, really attests to how amazing she is as an actress.

But even with some truly entertaining and well-acted scenes throughout, the overall experience this film tries to sell you on falls a bit flat. Having read the book, I knew exactly what was going to happen from the get-go, but unlike Gone Girl, this film sucks all of the excitement and build-up out of the proceedings. Everything here is acceptable to a fault: there’s really no true tension save for a great third act, and there’s no sense of foreboding danger oozing from every scene in the way I expected and hoped for. I know the filmmakers were telling me to be on edge and question everything I saw in order to put the puzzle pieces together, but unlike Gone Girl and it’s plot device of following clues that lead up to a great twist, The Girl on the Train simply tells the story as is with only a few haphazardly shot “flashbacks” to Rachel’s missing night that do little more than let the audience know that, yes, something awful did indeed happen. It’s a weird sort of handholding that doesn’t do much other than fill up space, and in the end, doesn’t do enough to peak interest in what’s supposed to be a super tense thrill ride.

The problem with this is two-fold; not only is this approach to storytelling rather bland and plodding, but the filmmakers seem to be more telling you how to feel rather than showing you something that makes you feel that way. Again, everything here is done in a totally serviceable way, but with subject material this dark and a storyline that begs you to try and figure out the twist before it happens, a lot of what goes down in this film does little to justify the tension the filmmakers are attempting to convey. This film is essentially a poor man’s Gone Girl with both the direction and overall adaptation of the source material done in the “safest” way possible, barely registering on a thriller scale let alone being able to hold it’s own as a drama.

Everything else about this film is pretty plain, the acting obviously the one bright spot here, but with a script that doesn’t elevate the source material in any meaningful way, The Girl on the Train suffers from boring plot progression and slow pacing that doesn’t pick up until well into the third act. With some great performances anchored by a perfectly okay script, this film has a lot going for it but unfortunately can’t find a way to tie everything together in the way the filmmakers clearly intended. Worth it if you want to see a faithful adaptation of the book, but middling for everyone else.