How much do you trust yourself when you’re drunk or heartbroken—or both?
This is the question that Rachel Watson must ask herself in the jarring thriller “The Girl On the Train.” An alcoholic and depressive after a failed marriage, Rachel rides the train to New York every day to a non-existent job, passing by her old neighborhood where she sees a couple that she starts to idealize as having the life she lost.
But one day, Rachel sees the woman with a different man, and the woman disappears. In her damaged state, Rachel finds herself falling further and further into the mystery, even as she battles her alcoholism and seeks to fill in the blanks in her memory.
As the public and police get involved in solving the disappearance, Rachel believes she needs to tell someone, anyone, about what she knows. It’s an act of bravery and lunacy, made possible by the volatile mixture of drink and being dead inside.
Simpler narrative
Based on the 2015 Paula Hawkins best-selling novel, “Girl” works because it features the wasted and wonderful Emily Blunt as Rachel. Pale, mousy and raccoon-eyed, Blunt presents such a miserable, unlikable portrait of the alcoholic Rachel that viewers may never want to get drunk again.
Blunt carries this film, just as Rachel carried the narrative of the Hawkins novel it’s based on.
The film exchanges the novel’s London setting for New York; director Tate Taylor (2011 Oscar best picture nominee for “The Help”) simplifies the book’s unhinged narrative, which is centered on the idea that Rachel is the most unreliable narrator of all.
“Girl” begins with the same unconventional, nonlinear narrative as the book, with various characters providing different points of view. But when “Girl” reaches its final act, the storytelling gets more basic.
“Girl” offers some genuine surprises; it intentionally stretches out into a spare, clear-eyed reflection on Rachel’s lifestyle. The idealized couple Megan (Haley Bennett from 2007’s “Music and Lyrics”) and Scott (“Fast & Furious 6’s” Luke Evans) are, of course, nothing like what they seem from the moving train window.
Further complicating things is Rachel’s rocky relationship with her ex-husband Tom (a great portrayal by Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).
While it would be easy to compare it with the 2014 David Fincher thriller “Gone Girl”—which is what happened with Hawkins’ work being referenced with Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel—“Girl On the Train” plays more like a diluted, domestic “Rashomon,” with context being more important than circumstance, the movie unraveling as Rachel struggles to regain her memory instead of character manipulation.
Moreover, it becomes a study of the flawed nature of modern marriage—
whether broken, on the verge of collapse, or still alive. If there’s anything “Girl” teaches Rachel and the viewers, it’s that she is wrong; there is no such thing as an ideal marriage—and there are much worse things than a flawed one.
Buoyed by Blunt’s omnipresent and yet obscure Rachel, the film draws attention long enough to unspool the onscreen marital fabric and the secrets hiding in plain sight. Emily Blunt’s razor-sharp and wounded performance alone is enough to make one see “The Girl on the Train”—reminding us that it’s not a bad thing when she says, “I’m not the girl I used to be.”
Universal Pictures’ “The Girl On the Train” is now showing in cinemas.
