Review of The Girl on the Train (2016) by Timothy A — 19 Oct 2016

A failure as a film, but a masterwork as an homage to mediocre 90s sex thrillers, perhaps best enjoyed after you've made up bingo cards with squares reading "confusingly similar looking blondes" and "fuck the babysitter!" (disclaimer: contains less actual sex than you'll want it to).

Perhaps the biggest problem, to the extent that you can pick a first among equals, is the way it tries to present the central character as an enigma before explaining her backstory, rendering her largely inhuman and alienating.

You can understand why Emily Blunt went for the role and she does her best with it, and the holes are largely the result of the script and mise-en-scene (e.g. the fact that she continues to wear mascara after a year as a barely functioning alcoholic - presumably to make sure everybody knows).

When you consider that it's so rare to see a film this female heavy without being a stereotypical "women's film" you can understand why the rest of the cast showed up too (Alison Janney, Laura Prepon, Lisa Kudrow).

But at the end of the day, it's a story that needed careful handling, and it's been given the opposite.