The Girl On The Train is an effective, well-constructed and tightly wound adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ 2015 best-seller (which did not, contrary to the poster copy, “shock the world”, but which did give readers a juicy little post-Gone Girl misty mystery to read on, well, the train).
Emily Blunt stars as an alcoholic divorcee who has a very bad blackout, the forgotten details of which may hold the key to a crime. Everything else deserves to be withheld, as this is a mystery through and through, and the less you know, the better.
Pity the trailer doesn’t adhere to the same restraint.
With only nine speaking parts (by my count), lots of atmospheric Upstate New York fog and excellent performances from Blunt and Rebecca Ferguson, specificity and containment are the keys here. Director Tate Taylor (The Help) deftly juggles the book’s relatively complex structure.
Worth seeing – just avoid the trailer.
CJ Johnson
I enjoyed the tidy nature of this story — three men, three women (well, one more detective and one more best friend, but they’re not part of it, really). All have issues, some are unstable, but who could be a *killer*!? Basically a soap opera designed to fit in a mini-van.
The movie version is a nice yankee translation of the original story which took place in the London suburbs. Thinking about it, there isn’t anything London-specific to the story, and thus was a successful “skinning” of the same plot. Emily Blunt’s accent isn’t explored as a plot point, and I’m glad they let her keep it. (I hate when actors have to adopt an accent even though it doesn’t affect the character.)
Best part of this movie, I thought, was the photography. Great close-ups and hand-held shots which make it feel very intimate. The colouring is also on-point, dying most of the scenes in deep blues and purples to show the characters’ ambiguous or shadowy nature. The more-innocent characters, in comparison, are mostly wearing light grey, beige, and pink. In the final scene, we see a change in [her] clothing to match. Anyone watching should keep an eye on this and how each scene is given a hue — blue for people in turmoil, brown for neutral ground like the police station or Cathy’s house, and white for innocence. Pretty clever, that.