Review of The Girl on the Train (2016) by Jake C — 16 Jan 2019

Though it tries extremely hard to fit the mold set by GONE GIRL, a thriller of feminine vengeance, the intricacies of the plot never rise above a sort of pseudo-sordidness and the characters are little better than the sketches in the titular girl's notebook. Break down the three women, all of whom are going through a breakdown and breakup of one sort or another, and what do you get:

Rachel (Blunt): The alcoholic whose untended, wallowing woes arise after she discovers that she can't get pregnant.

Megan (Bennett): The cheating coquette whose wanton ways (and eventual murder) can be traced to her overzealous ovaries and the resulting unwanted pregnancies (read here: whore).

Anna (Ferguson): Formerly there other woman and now ideal housewife (read here: madonna) who not only finally give her philandering husband the progeny that Rachel couldn't, but also dutifully works to provide an all-organic, extra-suburban home.

Women in this story are valued entirely by their ability to bear children and reinforce the heterosexual (and extremely white) relationship; men, meanwhile, are reduced to sheer id, wanting nothing more than to fuck and father offspring. That isn't just morally conservative and abhorrent, though: Merely repeating the expected norm also undercuts any sense whatsoever of tension or twist, the sine qua non of thrillers.