The Girl on the Train

Despite being a runaway bestseller, Paula Hawkins’ novel was not enthusiastically received by my book club friends, who complained about its confusing narrative structure and the long and lurid descriptions of the main character’s descent into drunken misery. So I approached the film with some reservations, but liked the title and looked forward to an interesting story. I was not disappointed…

The narrative of the film is told from the point of view of the three main female characters: Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), Tom Watson’s new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) and Megan, the Watsons’ nanny (Haley Bennett). Rachel is recently divorced and her ex is now happily settled with his new family. The trauma of her failed marriage has driven Rachel to drink – in a big way. For most of the film, she is a hollow-eyed mess, so ‘out of it’ that she regularly blacks out, effectively “losing” chunks of her life, and it is on this that the plot hangs.

Having lost her job (due to her drinking), Rachel takes to riding the train into New York every day, a journey which takes her past what used to be her marital home. However, her attention is focused day after day on a neighbouring house and she begins to be obsessed with the lives of the apparently ‘loved-up’ Megan and Scott Hipwell who live there. One day she spots Megan in the arms of another man and this makes her angry at what she perceives to be another infidelity. Upset at these echoes of her own failed marriage, Rachel goes on a binge and wakes up the next day bloodied and bruised, but with only a blurred recollection of the events of the previous evening. When Megan is subsequently reported missing, Rachel tells police what she saw from the train window. They refuse to take her seriously and so she goes to see Scott to tell him what she witnessed. From this point on, she becomes more and more invested in the case and tries, with great difficulty, to piece together her movements prior to Megan’s disappearance.

The structure of the film, with its non-linear plot, frequent flashbacks and shaky camerawork, at times makes great demands on its audience, but for me the various twists and turns of perspective made it interesting and gave a real sense of Rachel’s physical and emotional disorientation. The creepy, discordant music also helps to ratchet up the tension as the action edges towards its violent conclusion. And I was certainly kept guessing until the end - who killed Megan… her husband, her drop-dead gorgeous therapist, the random man in the street?! I liked the way things (and people) that we take at face value in the early part of the film are turned on their head by the end. All the way through the movie, we’re led to believe it is Rachel who is obsessively calling Tom’s phone late at night – it turns out to be Megan; Tom is not the kind, concerned individual we take him for – he’s the one with a controlling personality… and a murderer to boot. It’s not Megan and her therapist who are having an affair, but her and Tom; Tom didn’t lose his job as a result of Rachel’s drunkenness, but because he was sleeping his way through the list of female staff at his company. Slowly but surely, the scales fall from Rachel’s eyes, she emerges from her drunken fug and is able finally to piece together the jigsaw of what really happened that night in the woods.

Critics are unanimous in describing Emily Blunt’s performance as the lynchpin of this movie, turning in a perfectly nuanced and gut-wrenchingly honest portrayal of a complex and damaged character, but I thought much of the other acting was excellent too. Although well-acted, the character of “the second Mrs Watson” is a bit one-dimensional, but Megan – beautifully played by Haley Bennett - is much more interesting. Yet another damaged individual, she carries lots of baggage, not least the psychological scars of a teenage accident in which her baby daughter drowned and she was subsequently abandoned by her then lover.

Not just any old psychological thriller, The Girl on The Train is an intriguing film which deals with the themes of obsession, betrayal, abuse and personal tragedy, effectively making us (along with Rachel) voyeurs into the complicated lives of others. I also liked the film’s symmetry: the baby link with all three women, the mirroring of Megan’s and Rachel’s visits to the therapist, and the repeated train motif at key intervals in the action. Whether it’s better than last year’s Gone Girl? I’ll let you decide for yourself!

See the official trailer here: https://youtu.be/y5yk-HGqKmM