Paula Hawkins’ suspense thriller The Girl on the Train became a sensation upon its release. It had a blockbuster year, culminating in USA Today anointing it “2015 Book of the Year) and it was also the number one bestseller of the New York Times of that year. It hit the big screen, starring Emily Blunt as the title character, in 2016 and now has landed on Blu-Ray and DVD.
Blunt is Rachel, in one of her most powerful and riveting performances of her career. She is a woman who has been decimated by divorce, who commutes to New York City every day on the train and gazes out her window and lives vicariously through the people who live in these dream-like homes that dot the landscape of the Manhattan suburbs. She gets drawn into a mystery when she becomes taken with a couple, who seem to have the perfect life. When a woman of that community disappears, Rachel swears that she is a witness to a murder. With her sanity questioned by the police and most people she meets, the audience is left to wonder what is real and what is fabricated in Rachel’s mind.
Tate Taylor (The Help, Get on Up) directs the film that is a departure for the filmmaker. His handle on the material is solid as fans of the enormously successful book should be quite happy with what they see on the big screen.
That being said, often times books miss much when leaping to the movie format. In this case, a lot of what Rachel thought and thinks that was drawn out in Hawkins’ book is absent in the film adaptation and that is just the nature of the beast. Given that, Taylor and his filmmaking team do a solid job of capturing the madness of a person who is hell bent that their view of reality is the truth and that the swirling conspiracy that is swarming around her is actually the fiction in this quicksand of intrigue.
Blunt is joined in the stellar cast by Justin Theroux (who you will never look at the same way again!), Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Luke Evans (soon to be seen in the upcoming Beauty and the Beast), Laura Prepon, Lisa Kudrow and Allison Janney. Of all those stars, it is Janney who almost steals the film from its star!
The bonus features feature an array of deleted and extended scenes that show off Taylor’s talents for finding the sweet spot cinematically in terms of what should stay and what should go.
For fans of the book, the highlight of the featurettes has to be The Women Behind The Girl. Author Hawkins and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson team up to talk about how they tackled the difficult task of bringing a literary lightning rod of a smash hit to the world of celluloid. Their chat is fascinating in that it is a lesson in maintaining character integrity as a project goes from the written word to the visual landscape of the movies. Director Taylor also joins the discussion and shines a light on why it was such a delight to join creative forces with Hawkins and Wilson to bring The Girl on the Train to life.
On Board The Train is a satisfying behind-the-scenes expose at the talented ensemble cast and how each performer brought their own experience and talents to their roles. It’s also a terrific addition to the previous featurette as now we get to hear from the performers and how they saw bringing characters that solely existed on the page and filling them with emotion, life and three-dimensions. Taylor and producer Mark Platt join the conversation with Blunt, Ferguson, Bennett, Janney, Prepon, Kudrow, Theroux, Evans and Edgar Ramirez.
Lastly, appreciators of Taylor’s previous work will want to check out the film with the Feature Commentary with Director Tate Taylor turned on.
Film Grade: B
Bonus Features: B