The Girl On The Train

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Have you ever sat on the train, commuting to or from work, and gazed out the window… wondering who lives in that house? Or where is everyone going? This is the concept that kicks off the story “The Girl on the Train” based on the top selling novel from 2015 written by Paula Hawkins. But the idea of a woman who stares out at the world that whizzes past from her carriage is just the beginning of this thought provoking and tightly wound mystery. 

Emily Blunt plays Rachel, that girl on the train who commutes into Manhattan every day for work. Along the way she passes a collection of beautiful homes that line the Hudson River. One of them is owned by a young married couple, and from Rachel’s view they appear to be happy and blissfully in love. She sees them kissing on the balcony or sitting by a fire in the backyard, embracing each other intimately. Two doors down, is another couple, with a young baby. We soon find out, this house used to belong to Rachel, and the man used to be her husband. Now remarried and with a baby, Rachel passes by this display every day, wishing that was her life.

Rachel narrates the story as if the novel were living on screen, and this is done in a subtle way that isn’t overbearing as some narrations can be. We are drawn into her private world of sitting on trains, drawing what she sees, and drinking. Her former marriage ended badly and obviously, Rachel hasn’t moved on, as she makes sure she sits in the same seat in the same carriage every day to see her former life and her fantasy life pass her by in the two homes along her commute.

Then one morning, Rachel sees something out of the ordinary. What did she see? One of the couples doing something on the balcony that they shouldn’t have been doing. But it wasn’t the actual couple. One of the partners was there, but who was the other person? Rachel didn’t recognise them, but she knew it was out of the ordinary. This sends her on a fast downward spiral of anger and more drinking as she feels obliged to point out the wrong doings of what she saw.

Without giving too much away, what happens is a series of events revolving around a missing person, which Rachael may or may not be involved in. She drinks so heavily she has no recollection of the night, but when the police show up asking questions, and her appearance the morning after suggests she was involved in something brutal, she starts to search for answers. Instead of just passing by her former home on the train, she gets closer to it than ever, to find the truth and uncover a series of twists and turns that will keep her, and we the audience, guessing until the end.

I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie, so knew nothing about it before hand. I’d heard good things about it and I like watching Emily Blunt on screen; she commands her role as the broken, battered Rachel with total conviction, never overplaying the part and embodying the struggle of a woman trying to reclaim her former life while piecing together a mystery that haunts her, and possibly involves her.

The film-making on display in this film is first rate. The cinematography uses the effect of close ups on each of its actors to great extent, with their faces almost touching the screen at points. But this technique draws you into each characters private world, which they all inhabit, and which are driven by their own deep, dark secrets from the past. It also reveals an important aspect of human nature; we all have two sides to ourselves – light and dark. We can choose to act on the light side, but sometimes events transpire to bring out our dark side. But when lies and deceptions are involved, who is really the dark person in this story? We are led to believe it might be Rachel, but as each characters story is told through regular flashbacks over a series of months, and what brought them all together, we quickly learn that everyone is not who they seem.

It harks back to being that passenger on the train, sitting in silence, starting out the window and watching the world go by. We tend to do that more than connect with our fellow passengers, because we either don’t want to know them, or feel like we might be rejected if we approach them. But if someone had just spoken to Rachel on the train, instead of her withdrawing into her own private world of thoughts and grief, her life might have turned out quite differently. It’s only when she acts on what she sees that couple doing on the balcony and getting off the train to find the truth, that her life will change for good.

Overall, “The Girl on the Train” is a highly watchable film. Quite heavy in its tone and subject matter, and a morose and sombre mood hangs above proceedings. It offers you another twist or turn when you don’t expect it (unless you’ve read the book and you’ll know it’s coming) and it comes out of nowhere with scenes of violence that are quite impacting and brutal, that I heard the whole audience gasp in shock a couple of times.

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