If you're going to see this hoping for the October thriller event this year, you might be disappointed. It's not melo. It's not huge. And it's definitely not as accessible as the couple sitting behind me in the theater would have preferred (Which is surprising to me, since the filmmakers pointedly changed the setting from London to New York City for no apparent reason).
If, however, you're going to see this to relish in the darkness promised by the book, you are in for a real treat. Less a thriller and more a tightly wound psychosexual mystery, The Girl on the Train plays out almost as an indie film, complete with shaky camera, abstract editing, claustrophobia-inducing closeups, and an entrancing sense of place. Director Tate Taylor (famous for directing big-budget feel-goods The Help and Get On Up) disappears into his craft here in what is easily his best film yet, losing himself to the character of Rachel almost as much as Emily Blunt does. He views the film with a sometimes blurred camera, disjointed plotlines, and images that we can't trust. Amazing how well he took the unreliable narrator of Paula Hawkins's book and translated it to the screen: Not unlike in Oculus, here we see events happen that are memories and skewed perceptions, and some that even exist solely in the imagination of the characters. Yet there's not a single moment when you doubt the director's control over the film.
Blunt, too, gives one of her career's best performances. Though some might take issue with her not being fat, she more than makes up for the character's self-loathing and indulgent vices. Bleary-eyed and convincingly inebriated, Blunt stumbles her way through the picture with intoxicating energy, at once cold and fiery, fearful and fearsome. She and her director must have had a gold-mine of detailed conversations on how to do this movie, because they magically take the book's suggestions and turn them into arresting realities. Together, they turn the whole movie into a voyeuristic nightmare, a malicious cocktail of cruelty and passions and secrets and lies that teeters on the precipice, begging to be rescued but threatening to take you down with it. And down we go, as the film counters its more erotic and violent sequences with pseudo-confessional moments of Rachel's narration; seeing her tear-stained cheeks as she questions her own soul is incredibly sobering for us, if not for her. Watching Blunt in her drunken fury is one of the most awesome things you'll see at the movies this year. Don't miss it.
Hitchcockian in the best way, the film marries genres like it's a game. Suburban sexual thriller meets feminist psychological drama, and we are completely absorbed in the lives of these beautiful, broken people. More than once, actually, I let myself forget the ending and convince myself that literally any of the main characters were the villain. Scene by scene, I suspected someone else, and I wondered if the filmmakers were going to surprise us with a twist ending unlike the book's.
Speaking of the ending, that was the only time in the film that I felt a bit distanced from the film. Danny Elfman's fabulous score is suddenly hushed, and the horror I remember feeling as I read the final 30 or so pages of the book is exchanged for a strange lack of horror. We see terrible things happening, but for some reason it's not as brutal as I wanted the final confrontation to be. It feels oddly emotionless and cold. I don't think it's bad in any way, and it certainly fits with the voyeuristic style of the rest of the film. I just wanted a bit more of a bang. Of course, watching the villain get screwed in the end was thoroughly satisfying, so maybe my complaint doesn't matter.
IMDb: The Girl on the Train
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