Jungle
The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train

Movie
Director(s): 
Genre: 
In Theatres: 
Oct 07, 2016
Grade:
B-
Running Time: 
112 minutes
Pulling into a blindingly white suburb of New York, the film follows three women who are presented as tropey archetypes. Rachel (Emily Blunt) is the Burberry scarf wearing alcoholic ex-wife obsessed with her former life. She’s  unable to let her ex husband, Tom (Justin Theroux) move on with the mistress he married. Unable to have children with her former husband, she fixates on their new baby as she rides past their home on the train three times a day. 
 
Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), the new wife formerly-known-as the mistress of Rachel’s ex husband is the cold queen of her castle. She’s resenting the pressures of being a stay at home mom but bristles and drips condescension when her nanny, Megan (Haley Bennett), suggests going back to work.  
 
Rachel also watches Megan from the train, envisioning her love life as the epic romance she never got to have.  Megan is the young, artistic, beautiful, bored wife who feels trapped by the stillness of the town and by her husband who is yearning to expand their family. She expresses her restlessness by sleeping around. 
 
When Megan goes missing and is eventually found murdered, Rachel, deep in her alcoholism, makes assumptions and weaves lies with truth to try and alleviate her own loneliness.  Rachel becomes a suspect in Megan’s disappearance and attempts to gain clarity about that night’s events despite the haze of alcohol induced blackouts. 
 
The first half of the of the film is far too slow due to it trying to be something ambitious and interesting. We first see these three female characters: the alcoholic ex wife; cold, controlling stay at home mom; and  the homewrecking nanny; each as very unlikable tropes, through a toxic male gaze. We've seen these archetypes in film and books where women, without much reason, attack one another.
 
As melodrama meets murder mystery, the truth and isolation the trio experience changes when Rachel, on her journey to sobriety, reaches out to a woman from her past  (Lisa Kudrow) to apologize for embarrassing behaviors.  The way in which we see the trio begins to shift dramatically.  Their complexities, their humanity, and their motivations are revealed to us. The conclusion shows Anna and Rachel trusting each other, realizing their problems did not stem from themselves but from the toxic men and toxic masculinity that exploited and abused them. 
 
The Girl on the Train would have been better served as a mini series where the backgrounds of these women and their relationships could have been given more time to explore the layers and breathe. Trapped in the framework of film, some of these scenes plays out too slowly without pushing the plot nor deepening our understanding of the characters.
 
The Girl on the Train is a mystery that plays on your assumptions and is deft at misdirection.  It took too long for the train to pull into the station, but once we reach our destination it races to a riveting finish. *cymbal crash* I’ll be here all week!
Maria Jackson
Review by Maria Jackson
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