[yasr_overall_rating]
A divorcee becomes entangled in a missing persons investigation that promises to send shockwaves throughout her life.
Who isn’t a voyeur? Who hasn’t caught themselves possessing prying eyes, gazing beyond the fodder, the rabble, to fixate on a stranger? Examining clothes, stains, scars. Cataloguing every detail in order to arduously speculate the fantastical-real. I’d be quick to call someone a liar if they denied even the slightest suggestion of voyeurism. Perhaps that is too harsh and I, much like the protagonist of “The Girl on the Train,” have too much time on my hands and a restless imagination. Tate Taylor’s adaptation of “The Girl on the Train,” is made for those who love to look. And our dejected and oft soused heroine is the perfect guide, leading us to the homes and alcoves of suburban gothic playthings in this slinky thriller.
Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) had it all until she didn’t. Her perfect marriage and meticulously curated suburban home went down the tubes when hopes for a child were shattered. Now her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) has it all with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) plus one baby daughter Evie. Cast out, Rachel passes time boozing it up and mourning her losses by fixating on a “perfect couple” as she sits on a train to nowhere day in and day out. She can’t help but look. She also looks where she knows she shouldn’t. A couple of houses down from “her couple” is the house and life that used to be hers and now is merely a slap to the face and punch to the gut.
Rachel’s illusion is dashed when she discovers her perfect couple, Scott and Megan Hipwell (Luke Evans and Haley Bennett) are not quite so. She witnesses a betrayal through her passenger seat window and all her bitter passions roil within her like a violent fever. Slighted, she drinks full of rage and awakes in her bed with a nasty cut to the head, vomit in her hair, and a memory heavy with darkness. Her lack of memory becomes more alarming when she discovers, Megan, is missing or worse. Obsession and fear drives Rachel’s personal investigation into the disappearance. Everything is not what it seems as our derailing guide soon discovers.
This is a story of “mad” women. Women stifled, yearning, and demented in their sorrow. Women with carnivorous husband’s who are always hungry. As I stated before, this is a film for those who love to look. For those who love to see faces dangerously close. Faces that are purely and gratifyingly grotesque. I could look at a chap-lipped bleary-eyed Emily Blunt all day; it is perfection. And while Blunt may carry the film, Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson hold their own. And Justin Theroux and Luke Evans are beasts in their own right. It’s a delightfully toxic mix.
Tate Taylor’s “The Girl on the Train” may be a bit slower than desired for a thriller for some people, maybe even most people, but I don’t care. I enjoyed being tossed around the interlocking lives of these tragic women, in tragic suburbia. But truly it was the cinematography of Charlotte Bruus Christensen that captured me, pulling me into the shadows, into the gray and the dead, leaving me void of any desire to leave. I forever want to keep looking.
Available on Blu-ray & DVD January 17th
