Film Review: ‘The Girl on the Train’ is a Book Club ‘B’ Movie

CHICAGO – “The Girl On The Train” is a decent enough “Book Club” movie potboiler – it passes the time away, but never quite rises above the pulpiness of its source material. It desperately wants to recreate the suburban upper-class ennui and tone from last year’s “Gone Girl.” But while that film had David Fincher behind the camera, this one has Tate Taylor, the director of “The Help.”

Rating: 3.0/5.0

The film stars Emily Blunt as Rachel, an alcoholic British ex-pat sipping vodka from a water bottle, and fantasizing about the life she once led in the tony upstate New York Suburb of Ardsley-On-Hudson. She takes the train into Manhattan twice a day, staring at her ex-husband (Justin Theroux), his new wife and their daughter in the house she used to share. She also becomes obsessed with the young couple next door, Megan (Haley Bennett) and her hunky husband Scott (Luke Evans), but she soon suspects not all is as it seems. Megan mysteriously turns up missing after Blunt gets blackout drunk, gets off the train at her old stomping grounds, and wakes up covered in blood and with a head wound.

The film retains the book’s three narratives, switching back and forth between Rachel, Megan – a bored sexpot nanny and housewife – and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), her husband’s second wife. But Taylor puts the story on shuffle, flipping back and forth in time seemingly at random (much as he did with the James Brown biopic “Get On Up”), in an effort that confuses, rather than engages, the audience.

”The Girl on the Train” opens everywhere on October 7th. Featuring Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Lisa Kudrow and Allison Janney. Screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson. Directed by Tate Taylor. Rated “R”