The Girl on the Train is a slog of a movie with pretensions of quality that it is just sordid… but not sordid enough. It wants to be artistic but it’s telling a sleazy kind of story that’s also a Lifetime kind of vibe, I guess. It’s based on a book and I can only assume there’s something in those pages that didn’t translate well. The artistic desires of the film get in the way of any good dirty fun it could have been… and since it’s story is just tinged with sleaze and the film making not good enough, the artistic pretensions ruin what could have otherwise good dumb slightly embarrassing fun. But instead it is drudge work to watch.
Emily Blunt plays a wreck of a woman who rides a train every day and has time to spot and create a fantasy life for a beautiful couple living in a house along the tracks. I’m already leery of this slow-speed train story but whatever. Blunt’s performance is usually very good as she slowly reveals who kind of a disaster she is… but eventually you just realize she – and really every one else in this movie – is a terrible person and, personally, I stopped caring about happened to any of them early on. Which made for a very long slog of a flick.
Basically, this is a murder mystery whodunit that relies on the convenient recovery of memory from a blackout drunk. She knows exactly what happened but was too drunk to recall it… until the movie decides she can. So it’s a mystery that can be resolved at any time, for any reason, whenever the screenwriter decides the movie needs to come to an end. I kind of realized that I can predict whodunit but I can’t know because the clues are only in the head of a person who can’t remember what happened – there’s nothing to put together.
The movie is told in a deliberately disjointed way and I was very very confused early on… but I was kind of meant to be confused so I guess that’s ok? But part of that confusion is around two blonde women (not Emily Blunt) who deliberately look similar to each other and the movie asks us to keep them straight, keep their relationships with Blunt straight, and their relationships with their husbands straight while being told from the perspective of a blackout drunk. I give the movie credit for creating a blurry, bleary vibe where you aren’t sure what’s going on… that takes some skill. Like I said, this is intentional but doesn’t make me enjoy it.
That’s about all I want to say. Since there is a mystery going on here and revealing too much would be spoilers. I wouldn’t recommend this film – it’s quite bad and really tedious – but if you do go, might as well be surprised.
Score: 57