The Girl On The Train

by Smiley 22 September 2016

Ever since it topped the New York Times bestseller list last year, psychological thriller TGotT has been crying out like a girl getting a dragon tattoo for a movie adaptation.

For those of you that don’t know, it’s the story of Rachel Watson’s daily commute. Now, life post-divorce is pretty glum for poor Rach, especially as everyday her morning train journey takes her past her old house, where her ex-husband now lives with his new missus and their kid. Ouch, talk about a daily kick in the metaphoricals. So, in order to focus on something other than her pain every time she catches the 05:20, she starts watching a couple who live a few doors down from them every time she passes. She starts to imagine the mystery couple as the perfect, happy family. Until one day when she passes, she sees something spoiler-ish.

The next thing she knows, it’s morning, and she wakes up covered in cuts and bruises, with no memory of the night before. All she has is a vague feeling that something really, really not good happened. And that’s when she sees on the TV that little miss perfect from her fantasy couple has gone missing. Shit. Well, the only thing that she can think to do is to start unravelling the tangled mess of who did what to who, and why.

Here’s what I can tell you. Emily Blunt (Sicario) looks good in the main role, as does Hayley Bennett (Hardcore Henry) as the missing Megan Hipwell. Both of their significant (ex)others are played with equally creepy suspiciousness by Luke Evans and Justin Theroux, so the casting and acting are solid. There are a few changes from the book (e.g., it’s set in NYC not London) that purists may dislike, but that’s par for the course with these sort of things, and as long as they don’t derail the plot from the original, this looks like it should be on the right track.