Blunt is just the ticket as commuter who’s gone off the rails
The Girl on the Train 15 Cert, 112 min
Starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramirez
Paula Hawkins’s madly popular 2015 novel The Girl on the Train had a terrific main character. That she’s still terrific in the film is reason alone to see it. Rachel Watson is an unreliable narrator, and an unreliable person. At first, she seems a high-functioning alcoholic – then she exposes a series of ever-more-- disturbing truths about herself. She had a husband, Tom Watson (Justin Theroux); she doesn’t now. He remarried; she didn’t. His happiness is rubbed in her face every day, when the commuter train she rides goes past his house, which used to be hers, too.
Rachel is played by Emily Blunt, who throws every ounce of feeling she can at the role. With each plot twist, new cracks appear in her funny-tough façade. She becomes neurotically obsessed, not only (in a spin on Rebecca) with the second Mrs Watson (played by Rebecca Ferguson), but also – in more of a Rear Window scenario – with a neighbour called Megan (Haley Bennett), who conducts rather flagrant extra-marital affairs on her balcony.
Hawkins’s novel had amusingly precise descriptions of Rachel’s boozy commute. (“I open one of the little bottles of chenin blanc I purchased from the Whistlestop at Euston.”) The film ditches these details and, despite Blunt’s stubbornly English accent, shifts the action to upstate New York, to associate itself with the sexed-up gloss and suburban treacheries of David Fincher’s Gone Girl adaptation. It’s as if, en route to the screen, the novel has been given a full-body massage, teasing away any kinks that actually made it interesting.
Very early, we’re given to wonder whether Rachel, who blacks out on a night when Megan goes missing, is capable of a murderous revenge directed at the wrong person. The novel was strongest on alcoholic selfdoubt – the gnawing worry that you’ve done something atrocious.
It’s this, preserved in Erin Cressida Wilson’s script, that gives Blunt so much to chew on. And when the film sticks to her, it works. But it keeps springing away, to the perspectives of the other two women, which leads the movie around in circles. The director, The Help’s Tate Taylor, hasn’t figured out how to tighten his noose: we also shuffle between three men (Theroux, Edgar Ramirez, Luke Evans), trying to guess which will claim the gold medal for thuggiest misogynist.
Blunt’s Rachel might be a soused bit of human wreckage, but she’s better than this. You can’t help wishing this raddled stalker had just been allowed to direct her own film.
The Girl on the Train is out on Wednesday