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. It had none of Gone Girl’s literary flair or smarts but good films can be made from bad books (see Jaws, The Godfather etc.), although it certainly isn’t a given. (Everything by Dan Brown, ever, ever, ever.)
Our heroine is Rachel (Blunt), a divorced alcoholic who tips cheap vodka into her water bottle and commutes into the city every day because she can’t face telling anyone she’s lost her job. In the book, the city was London, but here Rachel has been uprooted to Manhattan. On her journey to and from upstate New York (presumably) she stares out the window at the passing houses, which are so huge and plantation-style it looks like they’ve been airlifted in from 12 Years a Slave.
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