The Girl on the Train review: red herrings on the tracks signal problems

Posted by John P. Bradford // October 4, 2016

Emily Blunt doesnt have nearly as much fun as she ought to in Tate Taylors adaptation of Paula Hawkinss bestseller and nor do the commuters who studiously ignore the hot couple having sex in full view of their carriage

The practice of referring to grown women as girls continues; here is the one on the train, as opposed to the gone one, or the one with the dragon tattoo. Last years mega-bestselling thriller from Paula Hawkins has been adapted for the cinema pronto.

But this hottest of literary properties lands with a lukewarm splat on the movie screen: a guessable contrivance with a biggish plothole. Lieutenant Columbo could have sorted it in five minutes. The complicated web of narrator-switches, flashbacks and POV-shifts seems clotted and Emily Blunt usually so witty and stylish is landed with a whingy, relentlessly weepy role in which her nose hardly ever resumes its natural colour.

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Blunt plays Rachel, a sad and lonely woman whose life has collapsed since the end of her marriage. She was with Tom (Justin Theroux), but the relationship was put under fatal strain by their failure to get pregnant. To add to her current wretchedness, Tom is now together with the woman with whom he was cheating on her: Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who has given him an adorable baby. Now Rachel drinks vodka all day, obsesses about Tom and Anna, has rages and blackouts, and in a pathetic state of denial rides the suburban commuter train into Manhattan where she has long since been fired from her PR job on account of the booze.

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