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The Girl on the Train review: Emily Blunt slightly miscast in pallid film adaptation

Emily Blunt looks anything but glamorous yet she still fails to win us over as the heavy drinking, stalking protagonist Rachel Watson from Paula Hawkins' novel.

Jake Wilson

★★★

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Trailer: The Girl on the Train

Rachel witnesses something shocking on her daily commute and becomes entangled in the mystery that unfolds.

Each morning, a woman travels to the city on a train that halts at the same spot, letting her look out the window at the home of an attractive youngish couple who can sometimes be seen canoodling on the balcony.

She starts weaving fantasies about them, imagining their perfect lives – till one day she catches the woman out the window embracing another, unfamiliar lover. The discovery of infidelity comes as a shock, as if a beloved fictional character had sprung to sudden, unwanted life.

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This is one half of the premise of Paula Hawkins' novel The Girl on the Train; the other side of the story similarly involves opening a window to speculation.

The protagonist Rachel Watson, played by Emily Blunt in Tate Taylor's film adaptation, is not just a fantasist but an alcoholic, one of the factors that has led to the end of her marriage, which in turn has furthered her emotional collapse.

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After drinking sessions, she suffers from blackouts – and when she's placed in the vicinity of an apparently fatal crime, she's forced to wonder about her possible involvement, as we are as well.

As a novel, The Girl on the Train has been greeted as the successor to Gillian Flynn's bestselling Gone Girl, filmed in 2014 by David Fincher. Both are twisty thrillers with multiple, potentially unreliable narrators – and both are "post-feminist" in the sense that they frankly centre on women behaving badly.

Rebecca Ferguson and Justin Theroux as Anna and Tom Watson in <i>The Girl on the Train</i>.
Rebecca Ferguson and Justin Theroux as Anna and Tom Watson in The Girl on the Train. 

But Hawkins is a relatively straightforward writer, lacking Flynn's knowing cruelty and her glib way with pop culture allusion. Likewise, Taylor compared with Fincher is a conventional director, not afraid to use schlocky subjective devices such as the slow-motion fragments which represent Rachel's lost hours.

Rachel, on the other hand, is anything but a conventional heroine. By her own admission, she's a voyeur, a stalker and an all-round mess – a plausible threat to the welfare of her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) and his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson).

<i>The Girl on the Train</i>, starring Emily Blunt, is the story of Rachel Watson's life post-divorce.
The Girl on the Train, starring Emily Blunt, is the story of Rachel Watson's life post-divorce. Photo: Supplied

All the same, she wins our sympathy, if only through her frankness about her own flaws. With her background in PR and tendency to embarrass herself, she's in some ways a soul sister to Bridget Jones.

Tate and his screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson have shifted the story's setting from London to New York, making everything slightly more glamorous – but the casting of an English star may reflect a sense that heavy drinking is more a British trait than an American one.

Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt.
Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt. Photo: AP

That said, Blunt, who is soon to play Mary Poppins, seems slightly miscast. She gives a decent but not startling performance – falling to pieces without wholly erasing her usual contained briskness.

Blunt isn't the kind of star who makes suffering glamorous: in close-up, she's haggard and red-eyed, staring past the camera as if she, too, were being viewed from behind glass. But the part calls for a more extroverted performer, who could win us over with bad behaviour while making us anxiously wonder what Rachel is capable of.

Emily Blunt as overweight alcoholic Rachel Watson in the film adaptation of <i>The Girl On The Train</i>.
Emily Blunt as overweight alcoholic Rachel Watson in the film adaptation of The Girl On The Train. Photo: Universal Pictures

Then again, it might be a deliberate strategy on Taylor's part to keep all his main characters rather pallid, leaving us room to speculate about them as Rachel speculates about the figures she views from the train.

The point of both the book and film isn't so much the solution to the mystery, but the hypothetical scenarios we're encouraged to ponder in the meantime – creating a sense that relationships in general are fraught with peril, with madness potentially lurking everywhere.

If the version of the story we imagine for ourselves proves more interesting than the one on screen, that's not necessarily a complaint. Hawkins, at least, deserves credit for devising a game that lets us all play along.

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