Review: The Girl on the Train

Emily Blunt plays a mentally unbalanced, seemingly lonely woman who travels to NYC by train every day and goes past her ex-husband Justin Theroux’s house. He’s moved on to a new wife (Rebecca Ferguson) and Blunt has been previously accused of coming into too close contact with her and their child. One day on the train, Blunt spies a neighbour (Haley Bennett) in an embrace with a man who isn’t her husband. Up until that point, she thought the neighbours were a perfect married couple and had fantasised about what their lives must be like. Soon after Blunt’s discovery, she attempts to confront Bennett about what she spied. Bennett goes missing and later turns up dead and since Blunt is mentally unstable and an alcoholic prone to blackouts, she claims to have no memory of what happened during their encounter. She is however a bit bruised and bloodied, which suggests something bad happened. Although cynical homicide detective Alison Janney finds Blunt incredibly likely as a suspect, when Blunt reveals what she saw between Bennett and her supposed lover, suspicion also falls on Bennett’s moody husband, played by Luke Evans. Edgar Ramirez plays a shrink to both Ferguson and Bennett.

I haven’t read the Paula Hawkins novel, but I hope it’s a lot more successful and ambitious than this terrible 2016 psycho thriller from director Tate Taylor (“The Help”) and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (The kinky “Secretary” and the somewhat erotic “Chloe”). I can only judge the film, and from all evidence to me, this feels like someone saw the success of David Fincher’s excellent “Gone Girl” and grabbed the first chick-thriller novel they could find in order to make a quick buck piggy-backing off that 2014 film even though this is the low-rent ‘erotic thriller’ version of “Gone Girl”. This really does feel like one of those late 80s/early 90s C-grade Shannon Tweed erotic thrillers, minus most of the sex you’d get in those direct-to-video erotic thrillers, and throwing in a helping of the rather stupid and overrated “Notes on a Scandal” instead. Or to put it more briefly and precisely, it’s “Notes on a Scandal” meets a sexually impotent “Whispers in the Dark” (There’s even a horny patient arousing her shrink, just like in “Whispers”). How in the hell did this one nab the normally intelligent Emily Blunt to star in it? It’s junk, and not even entertaining junk. Blunt’s genuinely good performance is the one and only commendable thing about this lame, over-populated film. If I were to make a guess based solely on the film, I’d have to assume that the appeal for (presumably female) readers is that the men are varying degrees of scum or dopes here.

I thought Emily Blunt was destined for stardom after seeing her in the otherwise disappointing “My Summer of Love”, but for every subsequent role I’ve enjoyed her in, she’s also been miscast in “Looper” and “Young Victoria” (Academy Awards voters obviously disagreed, granting her a nomination for the latter). Immediately terrific, she’s in a fairly comfortable role, playing a very, very troubled young woman whose obsessions may or may not be dangerous and delusional. This girl has zero social life apparently, drinks too much, and has a vivid imagination. That’s not a terribly healthy mix for someone, is it? However, one assumes fairly early on that the film is going to be a little more complicated than just the story of a crazy psycho, and yes I suppose it is a bit more complicated than that. It is not, however surprising as it’s pretty transparent from very early on what is going on here. Also not helping things is that unfortunately, no one else in the film is anywhere near as interesting as Blunt. Most of the cast are either uninteresting (Edgar Ramirez, Haley Bennett, a seemingly ancient Lisa Kudrow), unlikeable (Rebecca Ferguson has a really unpleasant presence and demeanour, Luke Evans plays a sour bore) or seriously amateurish (I’m still to locate Justin Theroux’s precise talent, and the normally terrific Alison Janney is surprisingly bad playing a cop who rather unrealistically follows a prime murder suspect into the ladies’ room. Yeah, that’d happen in no way at all).

Throwing herself into the lead role, Emily Blunt plays mentally unbalanced and pathetic uncomfortably well. However, this silly mystery/thriller is a lot trashier (yet tame) and more poorly written than I was expecting. If it at least had some decent sex or violence I could’ve enjoyed it somewhat on a trashy level. However, it’s done so straight and boring that one has to assume everyone involved saw this as being far loftier than I found it. What am I missing here? Is it a chromosome thing? Or is this Brian De Palma meets “Whispers in the Dark” just the junk it appears to be? It’s old-hat, abysmally clichéd and mostly uninteresting. “Gone Girl” it ain’t. It’s not even “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”.

Rating: C-