The Girl on the Train (2016)
Directed by Tate Taylor
Rachel Watson, devastated by her recent divorce, spends her daily commute fantasizing about the seemingly perfect couple who live in a house that her train passes every day, until one morning she sees something shocking happen there and becomes entangled in the mystery that unfolds.
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36 films that influenced The Girl on the Train
What critics say influenced The Girl on the Train
Hawkins’ novel drew similarly unflattering “Gone Girl” comparisons when it was published last year, though both Gillian Flynn’s book and David Fincher’s razor-sharp movie adaptation possessed a surgically precise wit — a willingness to merge the preposterous and the satirical — that neither version of “The Girl on the Train” is equipped to match.
Imagine if “Gone Girl” had been developed as a toothless network television pilot — if it had been stripped of its subversive approach to gender dynamics, bludgeoned free of its sadistic gallows humor and shot like a very special episode of “NCIS: Suburbia.”
Though much has been written comparing this film to Fincher’s salacious Gone Girl , they couldn’t be more dissimilar in tone, context, and execution.
Rather than offer any positive definition of its heroines, the film saddles them with tragedies and ugly aspersions: Infertility and adultery are running themes, and the closest the screenplay gets to the zeitgeisty topicality of Gone Girl .
The novel is often compared to Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” another book about an unreliable narrator.
It's "Rear Window" crossed with a soap opera, a throwback to "Single White Female"-style preposterous thrillers, a light ripoff of satirical psychodrama "Gone Girl" and a lurid slice of faux-forbidden post-ironic exploitationist crap a la "Fifty Shades of Grey."
But here, Taylor (who also directed 2012 best picture nominee “The Help”) deftly layers time, truth and perception into a psycho-sexual thriller that would belong in the same class as “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct,” except the characters in “Girl” are deeper and less cartoony.
Think “Peyton Place” as staged by the Adrian Lyne of “Fatal Attraction.”
Who knew director Tate Taylor ( The Help , Get On Up ) aspired to be Adrian Lyne ( Fatal Attraction , Unfaithful )? Taylor’s R-rated adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ bestselling debut novel The Girl on the Train comes awash in nudity, laden with sex scenes and psychotic violence.
It hinges on the bullshittiest of bullshit plot turns, and Taylor can’t even twist (and I do mean twist) its Fatal Attraction bathtub-style climax into a crowd-pleaser.
Violent in thought and deed, The Girl on the Train is a true thriller reminiscent of Fatal Attraction , the undercurrent of darkness relentless and cruel to Fincher-esque proportions (do note the R16 rating!).
Blunt plays Rachel Watson, bedraggled and drunk, just a boiled bunny shy of Fatal Attraction obsession with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux); his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson); and their baby.
But here, Taylor (who also directed 2012 best picture nominee “The Help”) deftly layers time, truth and perception into a psycho-sexual thriller that would belong in the same class as “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct,” except the characters in “Girl” are deeper and less cartoony.
Unfortunately, the quality is more on the level of “Sliver” than “Basic Instinct.”
It has a Basic Instinct vibe (although Tate Taylor lacks Paul Verhoeven’s talent for pushing envelopes and wallowing in the salacious).
It's "Rear Window" crossed with a soap opera, a throwback to "Single White Female"-style preposterous thrillers, a light ripoff of satirical psychodrama "Gone Girl" and a lurid slice of faux-forbidden post-ironic exploitationist crap a la "Fifty Shades of Grey."
The screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, has likened the film to “a moving Rear Window ”, which both overlooks the point of Hitchcock’s picture and highlights the problem with this one.
But as a complex, Hitchcockian (as in the obvious inspiration, Rear Window ) thriller, it misses by a wide margin.
After all, the story involves Hitchcock's favourite mode of public transport, it's built on a Rear Window-ish premise and the Megan and Anna characters are two ice blondes.
None of them are allowed a flurry of wit or a lighthearted shrug, and to switch from Grace Kelly, in “Rear Window”—a movie that dared to suggest how much fun might be had from the wicked watching of other lives and the amateur probing of crimes—to Taylor’s heroines is to pass from luminescence to a zone of querulous gloom.
There’s a Rear Window sensibility at play.
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Even though pathetically drunk leading ladies are relatively rare in movies (the best was Jane Fonda in The Morning After, a mystery-thriller that also fell apart), the novelty wears off.
Watching The Girl on the Train, I thought of the recently deceased director Curtis Hanson and one of his lesser works, 1987’s The Bedroom Window.
In that moment, Blunt brings together two great Nicolas Cage performances: his Oscar-winning turn as a suicidal alcoholic in "Leaving Las Vegas," and his lunatic eye-bulging in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans."
Most importantly, in the shape of the mercurial Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train has a believably derailed heroine whose hollow eyes, crusty lips and stumbling gait convey Leaving Las Vegas levels of addiction while still retaining an air of mystery and intrigue.
It’s here that “The Girl on the Train” starts to sound like “In a Lonely Place,” in which a struggling screenwriter, played by a never more intimidating Humphrey Bogart, might have killed someone — and even if he didn’t, that we thought he could commit murder is nearly as disturbing.
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In “Gaslight,” Ingrid Bergman plays Paula, a woman whose husband, Gregory (Charles Boyer), attempts to convince her that she’s insane.
You don't often see middle-class alcoholism on screen (I can't remember any instances since Meg Ryan in the devastating When A Man Loves A Woman ) and Blunt delivers a typically eviscerating, horrifying real experience of a life in ruins.