Deborah Ross

Wrong side of the tracks

The film has all the ingredients of a psychological suspense thriller if only it were a) psychological and b) suspenseful and c) not crap

issue 08 October 2016

You will surely have seen the posters for The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring from a train window beneath the question: ‘What did she see?’ I don’t know …buddleia? Bindweed? The occasional abandoned supermarket trolley? That is all most of us see from trains and while it’s true that buddleia, bindweed and the occasional abandoned supermarket trolley would make for a very dull film, it could scarcely be any duller than this. And that is the truth.

This is an adaptation of the thriller by Paula Hawkins; a thriller that, I would venture, attained bestseller status largely because it was touted as ‘the next Gone Girl’ and ‘the British Gone Girl’ and we all fell for it. I fell for it myself and if you read the book, as I did, you’ll have got a quarter of the way through and, having worked out what was going on, binned it so you might turn your attention to something more riveting, like pairing socks or compiling your tax return.

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