Fans of Paula Hawkins’s runaway bestseller have reacted with dismay to the changes made to her story as it travelled from the page to the screen. Whether it’s shifting the destination from the grit of London to the gloss of New York, or casting commuters “too glamorous” to ride this route, The Help director Tate Taylor has signally failed to reassure doubters that their beloved journey has not been disrupted. Yet for those (like me) who jump aboard Taylor’s movie before reading the book, there’s plenty to keep this cinematic train a-rollin’, from Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s adventurous cinematography to Danny Elfman’s expressive score and Erin Cressida Wilson’s oddly sympathetic script. 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.
Stupefied by her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux), Blunt’s permanently pickled Rachel travels the picturesque Hudson Line into the city, passing through the leafy, upmarket suburb where Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) is now raising a child with Rachel’s ex-husband. Attempting to avert her gaze from her former home (“That bitch is living in my house”), Rachel fixates on a neighbouring dwelling whose glamorous inhabitants seem to be staging theatrical acts of love for her viewing pleasure. Rachel imagines them existing in a state of bliss, until she glimpses something that cuts against her sozzled fantasies. When Haley Bennett’s alluring Megan goes awol, Rachel presents herself to handsome Scott (Luke Evans) as an old friend with crucial information. But do Rachel’s own lapses of memory hide a guiltier secret?
“I’m not the girl I used to be,” says the circling narration, a phrase that echoes throughout the film, linking the central characters, all of whom are variously living a lie. There’s a strong, feminist-inflected suggestion that Rachel, Megan and Anna are different sides of a singular shared experience, their dreams, memories and voices intermingling in a mosaic of female rage, a silent scream in this modern Stepford. Intertitles announcing fluid character perspectives (“Megan”, “Anna”), and time frames (“Six months ago”, “Last Friday”, “Today”) are flashed up on screen, but it’s Christensen’s camera that really defines our point of view, from the gliding shots of restless Megan, through the glacial home life of Anna, to the in-your-face expressionist inebriation of Rachel. As seen through Rachel’s eyes, the world has an appalling hangover, forever awakening in a pool of blood and vomit. There’s a touch, too, of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (memorably filmed as Angel Heart) about Rachel’s struggles to remember who she is and what she has done, a hint of horror behind the Fatal Attraction facade.
Unflattering comparisons with David Fincher’s more stylish vision of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl are inevitable, although a closer screen cousin would be Rowan Joffe’s amnesiac thriller Before I Go to Sleep (from SJ Watson’s novel), a connection emphasised by a line of Rachel’s voiceover, which eerily echoes that title. Hitchcock’s Rear Window obviously looms large too, yet it’s the erotic thriller template laid down by the Joe Eszterhas-scripted Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct that casts the longest shadow. Screenwriter Wilson’s credits include Secretary and Chloe (the latter being Atom Egoyan’s unloved remake of Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie… ), both of which vaguely prefigure the voyeuristic twists served up here as she wrestles with the multiple voices of Hawkins’s source.
In the end, however, the whole movie rests upon the shoulders of Emily Blunt, and she holds it all together brilliantly, even as her character is falling apart. From the intimacy of My Summer of Love, through the “hangry” sorcerer’s apprentice of The Devil Wears Prada to the sci-fi action heroine of Edge of Tomorrow and the blindsided FBI agent in Sicario, Blunt has proved herself to be a mesmerising presence in a range of genres. In Rachel’s fractured personality, we see echoes of Blunt’s previous screen lives, refracted through a prism of self-destruction that somehow never alienates the audience. Retaining the British accent that makes her even more of an outsider in this scary New World, Blunt convinces completely as a drunken fish out of water. This train may not be bound for glory, but her disruptive company is worth the price of the ticket.
