Film Review: ‘The Girl on the Train’

As anyone who’s recently spent time in the snack car of an Amtrak train can attest, a lot of the romance has left the railways since Cary Grant sipped a Gibson with Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest.”

So “The Girl on the Train,” Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), must seek her intriguing affairs outside the transit she takes from Hudson River suburbia to New York City every day. While it’s fair to assume that the Metro-North would often be in a delay, Rachel gets in trouble because the train always seems to slow down outside the house of the Hipwells: Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans). Thanks to Rachel’s willingness to spy (and her remarkably acute distance vision), we see that Megan favors a very revealing balcony costume when she awakens and that Scott slinks around behind her with barely-restrained sexual menace.

Oh, and it happens that the Hipwells are two doors down from Rachel’s former domicile, where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) live with their baby. Tom is a hard-hearted, Don Draper-inspired prig and Anna wears the silent scream of a woman trapped in a Martha Stewart catalog. At one point Anna tells a quite emotional story about the difficulty of pureeing sweet potatoes to her improbable nanny, Megan. In playing the young woman, Ms. Bennett aims for the seductiveness of a Jennifer Lawrence femme fatale but hits closer to Jennie Garth in a Lifetime movie of the week.

After the breakup – there’s no telling whether Tom left Rachel because in vitro fertilization failed or because she insisted on maintaining unflattering bangs – our heroine slid into alcoholism. She shows the two trademark signs of a chronic drinker: water bottles filled with vodka and poorly-applied eyeliner. Unfortunately, her slurs and shakes are overplayed as she sits down in Grand Central Station and weeps while the camera woozes around her.

One night, Rachel goes on an extended bender, takes the train to her old neighborhood, stumbles around in the nearby woods and wakes up covered in blood. It’s thus distressing that Megan is missing the next morning, presumed dead. The local detective, Sgt. Riley (Allison Janney, showing exasperation with all these nitwits), focuses her enquiry on Rachel and Scott. This follows real world logic but savvy viewers of lurid thrillers know that the killers are never the most obvious suspects.

In the manner of all wrongly accused film protagonists, Rachel conducts her own investigation, including a visit to Megan’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kamal Abdic (Édgar Ramírez), who winds up holding more erratic office hours than most therapists. As with presidential races, sometimes you’re the most appealing candidate simply because you don’t assault anyone – while the other gentlemen show their anger by shattering mirrors and striking their wives, Dr. Abdic merely speaks in rapid Spanish – he’s upset.

As Rachel attempts to recover her boozy memories of Megan’s disappearance, the narrative coalesces into a 2 a.m. made-for-TV potboiler, except much longer. What it ratchets up isn’t tension but instead frustration at a most obvious twist, telegraphed by a series of images seen repeatedly from the opening moments of the film.

Director Tate Taylor’s work here can be compared to another depraved movie, “Gone Girl,” but when David Fincher makes a bad film it is enjoyably bad, whereas “The Girl on the Train” is unenjoyably bad. It’s adapted from Paula Hawkins’ bestseller of the same name, and the book is far likelier to keep you engrossed on your evening commute.