FILM REVIEW: The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train (15).

Starring: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson.

Thriller/mystery.

EMILY Blunt delivers a career-best performance in the tense, suspenseful film version of Paula Hawkins’ smash-hit novel The Girl on the Train.

Blunt plays Rachel, a dishevelled, unravelling, barely functional alcoholic who spends her days drifting around the city and taking the train past the row of big houses where she used to live.

She is fascinated by the supposedly-idyllic life of a “perfect couple” whose house backs onto the tracks — a brown-haired hunk and sensual blonde woman who are forever snogging on the back porch and doing unspeakable things on the kitchen counter.

It transpires that Rachel used to live next door, and her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) is shacked up in her old house with his former mistress, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and a new baby — a situation Rachel is no stranger to vehemently taking issue with.

After spying the blonde woman — revealed in the intervening scenes as disenchanted nanny Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett) — apparently jeopardising her “perfect” lifestyle, Rachel takes matters into her own hands and gets off the train early to confront her.

When Megan is reported missing, Rachel finds herself among those under suspicion, and can’t resist trying to find out herself whodunit — and more to the point, what they have “dun”, since she was so drunk at the time several hours are missing from her memory.

Telling the story largely from Rachel’s perspective but also from that of Megan and Anna, writer Hawkins and director Tate Taylor slowly fill in the blanks through a series of flashbacks, confrontations and plot twists.

What becomes clear is that despite their massive houses, big cars and immaculate hairdos, these people’s lives are far from perfect and they all have troubles in their past — and hang-ups in their present.

The film is not without its flaws — it’s barely believable the train would conveniently stop at the same snoop-favouring spot every day (it doesn’t seem to be at a station), while third act developments depend on the extremely unlikely location of a key clue and the end is disappointingly routine.

Having said that, the story is sufficiently gripping until working up a head of steam in the final reel and hurtling towards a histrionic climax.

Director Taylor deserves credit for keeping the plot chugging along nicely, making use of rail-side fogs and damp forests to maintain a sense of claustrophobia and general misery, and allowing Blunt, via unfussy direction, to shine.

Having often previously featured as a romantic foil for the male lead, Blunt is outstanding in the central role, portraying Rachel’s struggle with alcoholism and the emotional fallout of her marriage breakdown and other personal tragedies through facial expressions, a wavering voice and a visibly folded-inward, down-trodden posture.

One scene has her waking up bruised, caked in blood, sodden with tears and with lumps of vomit in her hair — a truly tragic figure.

In a collection of sad characters, Rachel is the saddest of all — but Blunt makes her never less than watchable.

Hawkins’ story has clear echoes of the other trouble-in-wealthy-paradise bestseller of recent times, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, from a wife’s mysterious disappearance to the soft focus suburban setting.

But The Girl on the Train — despite its fairly routine thriller ending — outshines its predecessor at top of the “missing wife” hit list, Blunt’s stellar showing as a woman right on the edge saving it from being just one more made-for-TV psychological thriller.