I'll be honest, I saw the trailer for this film, and I didn't find it interesting, I had no intensions of watching this film, even less so when I saw that is was getting so-so reviews, but I went to the cinemas with a friend who I said could decide what film we watched, and we ended up watching this, so here we go.
This film, like a few films I've seen this year that turned out to be not all that good, started out well enough, introducing us to Rachel as she takes the train and fantasises about the people she watches, before introducing us to a particular person she watches, the emotionally troubled Megan, who in addition to being played by the incredibly attractive Haley Bennett, is probably the most interesting character in the film. Let's start with what I like about the film, shall we; it being a thriller, there's a big reveal towards the end of the film which was kind of interesting, and, like I said, Haley Bennett's a looker. And now for what I was not so fond of, because I'll be blunt now, this film was a sloppy, boring, unnecessary mess of a thriller. The film quickly goes and throws whatever interest or intrigue is built early on because the plot just grinds on. While you're interested in Rachel and her fantasies and her past at first, it quickly becomes apparent that she isn't the most likable of people herself, and while people have screwed her over in the past and driven her down the road that she's on in this film, she hasn't helped herself out much. She's an alcoholic, and while that can be played in a way that you can feel for, this film doesn't really do that, frankly for the first half of the film, she's just a drunken, boring, unlikable character. Megan is a much more interesting character, as the film goes on you learn through flashbacks that her perfect life isn't so perfect and that some bad shit has happened in her life too. But like Rachel, the appeal of the emotionally damaged character wears off, as just like Rachel, she's not entirely clean of blame for the situation she's in. The same story applies to Rachel's ex-husband's wife; Anna, but while Rachel and Megan have led troubled lives, Anna can, at least for the first half of the film, arguably be blamed for the shit situation that Rachel found herself in. Those are the 3 characters in this film whose names you have a chance of remembering, Scott, Tom and Kamal are all effectively there to fill the role they play in the plot, while offering nothing particularly interesting or meaningful to it. Rounding up all of these characters is very simple; it's a very character driven film, full of characters that by the end you either don't remember or feel way less sympathy for than you're supposed to. This really isn't helped by the simple fact that literally every single person in this film is having sex with everyone else, and everyone is always talking about how they've had sex with people and how they want to have sex with people, and how everyone thinks that they're having sex with people, there's a lot of people having sex. This in and of itself is not a bad thing in films, if it is used in a way that is constructive and or useful to the context or plot, but here it's not; here you have a bunch of promiscuous little drunks, abusive husbands and damaged people who literally always have to bring up that they've fucked so and so on that table that they also fucked someone else on. Fucked is also a word that is said way to many times, well beyond the point that it sounds like whoever wrote the script was trying too hard. Speaking of script, there's a few times when people do or say something and people in the audience around us starting laughing, I couldn't really stop myself from joining them because it was that stupid.
The Girl on the Train does at least do a good job of conveying how lost and confused Rachel is, since she doesn't have the evidence, the problem is that she isn't the only one confused about what's going on. Whether deliberate or not, the inability to tell what's really happening and what isn't really isn't done well, or useful in telling an interesting or cohesive story, which this film doesn't. The Girl on the Train relies heavily on flashbacks to fill in the backstory of its characters, the film does, at several points, jump back and forth by a period of several months, showing Megan in therapy getting needlessly sexual with her shrink, and the events that led to Rachel's divorce, both from her husband and from reality it seems. Flashbacks, like sex, and alcoholism, is something that can be used effectively, but yet again, here it is not; the film jumps back, telling you that this is 2 months ago or 6 months ago, but then the film will jump forward again and not tell you, and you'll have to pick up on that little detail yourself, multiple times, it's just confusing. Another confusing choice is how the film sometimes drops to a lower frame rate in certain scenes, this is definitely intentional, and it's something I would be able to understand if it was used more conservatively, which it's not, it's used constantly, even in times where it simply isn't needed. This may be considered a spoiler, so if you actually don't want this film's plot spoiled, skip to the end, but at the end of the film you learn that one of the characters is actually a really bad person, in fact, it turns out that most the shit that has happened in everyone in this film's lives is because of them to some degree, and of course, they are the reason Megan disappears. My question is, if there's a police investigation into Megan's disappearance, wouldn't this person be a suspect in the investigation because they would, or at least should, already have a criminal record for the shit they have done, and for this character's particularly strong tendency of shagging every single person they meet, also considering how shag happy the disappeared woman is. There are multiple times in the film where you expect something to be the case, and it's not, but this isn't the result of a clever curveball, this is the result of a sloppy screenplay.
I didn't even know what to make of this film when I left the cinema, but a lot of the people I watched it with came out saying they loved it and it was really good, I'm glad they got something out of this film that I didn't, but I struggle to believe they watched the same film as me, because this film is not good. It's a messy, sloppy, boring, confusing collection of kind of interesting ideas that were used really poorly, kind of interesting characters that the film seemingly goes out of its way to make you dislike, and a structure that was completely wonky, with pacing that was all over the place, and sex that was literally all over the place, in every bed, on every table, in every shower and on every tree. There's one scene in this film I actually really liked, and I won't say what it is, other than it involved Megan's past, it was a very emotionally effective scene, and it really makes you feel for her character, it also makes me like the rest of the film even less, because if there was the potential for a good film in here, I struggle to work out where on earth it went. I would definitely not recommend The Girl on the Train.
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