To read Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train is to take a lurid trip not only on a locomotive clacking its mundane way down the steel tracks of London but also to descend into the mind of a woman slipping earnestly toward madness.
From a window seat on a commuter train to London, Rachel Watson, heartbroken divorcee-turned-casual-voyeur (and not-so-casual alcoholic) watches day after day as the same beautiful couple lives their beautiful life together in a house not far beyond her glassy view. She soon forms an unrequited kinship with the pair (though she only knows them as far as her eye can see) and this bond remains unbroken until her sudden realization that the gorgeous woman has gone missing. Now Rachel, onetime girl on a train, finds herself transported into the mystery of a marriage—and a life—gone awry.
Hailed as an expertly written second coming of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train is just as page-turning as its literary associate, and like Flynn’s novel also lifts the tupperware lid off an unblemished suburban relationship to reveal the grim, potato-casserole-mold festering beneath.
To do fair justice to such a gripping story, it would only be right that the movie version of The Girl on the Train play out just as ominously, introspectively and electrifyingly as the book it portrays. And if its brand-new trailer is any indication, the film riding into theaters October 7 won’t disappoint.
With Emily Blunt playing Rachel, Luke Evans and Haley Bennet starring as the handsome couple she ogles, and a train whipping its way to New York City instead of London Town, the movie will certainly contain subtle changes from the narrative devoted readers of Paula Hawkin’s novel know and love. Still, it’s clear director Tate Taylor (The Help, Get On Up) took care to build the same chilling intensity and develop the same sense of sweat-inducing mystery for his rendition of Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train brought to a dark blaze of cinematic life.
