Where have all the good girls gone? They certainly aren’t on my bookshelves, which have buckled under the weight of Amy Dunne’s heiresses apparent. Gone Girl’s central character is in a league of her own, of course, for reasons that can’t be discussed here in case any recently awakened coma patients are turning to these pages to reacquaint themselves with pop culture. But suffice it to say that Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster 2012 novel launched a literary trend that has thrived long past the publishing industry’s fears of market saturation. And in the onslaught of unreliable narrators, missing wives, and damaged women that has flooded bookstores in Gone Girl’s wake, The Girl on the Train reigns supreme.
Paula Hawkins’ zeitgeist-friendly tale of an alcoholic divorcée, a young mother with a sordid past, and the slippery, beautiful gone girl who ties them inextricably together makes a rocky but mostly satisfying transition to the big screen, thanks in large part to a thoroughly unlovely performance by the lovely Emily Blunt. It never manages to be as enthralling as its source material; for all the reviews that lauded the book for its cinematic qualities, its revolving narrators and scrambled timeline provide as many obstacles as opportunities for screenwriter Erin Cressida Williams and director Tate Taylor. But in spite of an uneven first half, it comes together well enough to put it firmly in guilty-pleasure territory.
Before we go further, it must be said that most of the recent Girl books are not about girls at all. A few of them, such as Emma Cline’s The Girls and Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire, really are concerned with female adolescence at its thorniest, but most of these titular “girls,” whether they’re prone to obsessive rail travel or defined by the ragged holes their disappearances have left behind, are adult women straining at the confines of modern domesticity.
The protagonist of The Girl on the Train certainly belongs to this breed of troubled women, though she makes her compatriots—and, for that matter, nearly everyone on the planet—look like paragons of pragmatism. Your life might be a mess, dear reader, but if you can make it to a movie theater, you’re holding it together better than poor Rachel Watson. Hawkins’ hot mess of a narrator—do I need to tell you she’s unreliable?—has lost a few of her sharper edges thanks to the casting of Blunt, but fans who were upset by the choice can rest easy. Blunt goes for the dysfunctional gold, reveling in Rachel’s vodka-fueled haze of slurred speech, teetering walk, and violent, embarrassing meltdowns.
Fired from her job long ago, Rachel spends her days riding a commuter train back and forth from New York City to a dull suburb on the Hudson, where she once lived an idyllic life with her husband, Tom (Justin Theroux). For reasons best left discovered, Rachel has been booted from her home and replaced by Tom’s former mistress and new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Rachel further tortures herself by fixating on a young couple a few doors down from Tom and Anna. Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans) represent everything Rachel once dreamed of having, until she sees Megan canoodling on her balcony with a man who isn’t Scott. When Rachel makes a succession of terrible decisions, driven by what she sees as Megan’s betrayal, she finds herself at the center of a missing-person investigation.
The Girl on the Train, in both its literary and cinematic incarnations, carefully aligns itself with the Hitchcockian tradition of suspense, but it owes more to Peyton Place than Rear Window. For long stretches, it feels like a thriller only because it looks like one. Taylor loads the film with stylistic flourishes, from canted camera angles to clever focal-plane manipulations, to make his adaptation feel disorienting and lurid even when people aren’t beating one another senseless or having gropey sex in public places.
Yes, it’s a tale driven by a crime—we know this mostly because the always welcome Allison Janney occasionally pops up as a police detective to remind us that something nasty is afoot. But in spite of its bouts of shocking violence and the crackling tension of its masterfully staged finale, this is melodrama at its most melodramatic. It’s less concerned with the visceral thrills and dangers of voyeurism than the decidedly more somber question that drives its plot: How well do we really know one another? Or, for that matter, ourselves?
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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