The Girl on the Train

About once a fall Hollywood decides to release an adult thriller based on a popular novel. The movie is R-rated, usually features some degree of mystery, sex, and murder and makes more money than people expected. Though I'm not a bookworm myself, I'm always interest in adaptations like this, especially if top-notch talent, like the always excellent Emily Blunt, is involved. As such I decided to check out this year's adult thriller, The Girl on the Train.

Blunt stars as Rachel Watson, a recovering alcoholic who uses daily viewing of a local married couple from the train as a coping mechanism for her own failures. But when Rachel sees something that upends her perfect vision of said couple and subsequently blacks out, Rachel quickly finds himself involved in a startling mystery.

For frequent movie watchers such as myself, thrillers like The Girl on the Train tend to be at their most effective when the journey is more rewarding than the payoff. Put another way, I didn't love Gone Girl for all of its twists and turns and reveals, I loved it because it was excellently acted, had a lot of interesting critiques of romance, marriage, and expectations, and was an excellent mix of trash and naturalistic drama. Reveals can make a movie memorable, for good or for ill, but for someone like me, it doesn't make it more effective.

I mention this because The Girl on the Train feels most more interested in reveals than thematic depth. The structure of the film is rather odd with the majority of the film being told from Rachel's perspective with a number of shifts back and forth in time to other characters or events past. It's an odd technique for a mystery because instead of the lead character or perhaps a detective discovering all of this for themselves, a good portion of the film's juiciest secrets are revealed via flashback. It's a wonky structure and I don't think it serves the film very well.

The mystery itself has a lot of potential, but never truly pays off. There's a lot of things at play like the troubling tendencies of addiction (i.e. Rachel has genuine problems remembering what happened the night something shady went down), romance, marriage, sex, and the obligatory nature of motherhood, but it's almost entirely surface level stuff.

The movie also doesn't do itself any favors by making a fair number of its lead characters genuinely unpleasant. We understand Rachel is an alcoholic due to the disintegration of her marriage but almost every other character comes across as a varying degree of jackass. This is different than something like Gone Girl where of one the character's obvious failures shades your view of him. This is I genuinely don't care if half of these people are dead or go to jail.

The film's most redeeming quality is the lead performance by Emily Blunt. Blunt has frequently been cast as exceptionally confident and competent people, but she truly dives into the alcoholic mindset and behavior here. She seems to get that being a stumbling drunk isn't the only stage someone struggling might demonstrate. Her eyes might be glazed over. She may have slow slightly inappropriate reactions and she reaches for the bottle when she feels uncomfortable. You really get the impression that something inside of her is a bit broken and needs healing.

The rest of the cast is pretty good but no one besides Blunt really gets any semblance of depth.

So without discussing the surprises in this movie, are they enough to sustain the film? Not really. In fact some of the biggest moments feel either obvious or completely unnecessary. There's at least one or two big moments that I think the screenwriter got chills putting to paper, but I was shrugging going "How does this change the plot...at all?" The script also has a tendency to throw something showy like a sex scene or an outburst just as the audience is losing interest so it feels far less purposeful and more exploitative.

Meandering and generally uninteresting, The Girl on the Train may entertain thriller fans but will likely fade into obscurity. Skip this one.