‘The Girl on the Train’ attempts to be a ‘Gone Girl’ but director Tate Taylor is no David Fincher. Also the subject material, adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from a best-selling novel by Sally Hawkins, is intriguing enough but the characterizations and perspective don’t allow for a totally intense inveiglement. While the narration is interesting it doesn’t find a strong enough focus and the spiel thereof doesn’t allow for complete immurement.
The convoluted timeline introduces Rachel (Emily Blunt) a divorcee - who is almost always in too much of an alcoholic haze to be able to think clearly. So what she sees or the way she sees it may not necessarily make sense. Rachel has taken to obsessing about the love life of Megan (Hayley Bennett) married to Scott (Luke Evans), who she sees as herself in a former life. And this she does while travelling aimlessly back and forth, on a train that makes tracks right through her not-so-distant past. Then Megan disappears, Rachel is plagued by memories of an assault and the police are investigating whether it’s Rachel (who was near the scene of the crime at that time) or Megan’s husband Scott, who did the deed. And the mystery unravels…
The book was quite intriguing and hard-to-put-down but the movie of it is not much of a perfect match. And that’s so mainly because the story-line involves seeing things from the perspective of someone in an alcoholic haze made even more distant by the fact that she is on a moving train for most of the runtime. Adding to that degree of difficulty is the messy chronology that hearkens back to the past while chugging aimlessly through the present. The complicated entanglement of characters may add complexity to the narration but there appears to be a certain degree of manipulation in the telling of it. The big reveal comes when Rachel’s ex-husband Tom (Justin The roux) now happily remarried to Anna (Rebecca Fergusson) and blessed with a child, is thrust into the foreground brought forward by Rachel’s obsessive fixation with the baby. And from thereon it’s an interesting unraveling though not much of a surprising or shocking one. So it’s entirely up to Emily Blunt to save the film from becoming just another ‘Gone Girl’ wannabe. It’s largely her well-endowed, entirely relatable performance that lends memorability to the experience while rescuing it from being just another serviceable thriller.
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