The Girl on the Train (15)

three stars

Dir: Tate Taylor

With: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Laura Prepon

Runtime: 112 minutes

PAULA Hawkins’ thriller, like Gone Girl before it, has been a publishing phenomenon, with scarcely a sunlounger or bedside complete without a dog-eared copy. As with Gone Girl, the book has now been turned into a film. A shoo-in for continued success, then? Unfortunately not. As journeys go, Tate Taylor’s picture is more on a par with a delayed, overcrowded Glasgow to Edinburgh ScotRail service than the Orient Express.

The story, as the millions who have read it will know, is that a young woman, dissolving into alcoholism after a divorce, takes the train from the ‘burbs to the city every day to work. Gazing out of the window and into their back garden, she regularly sees a young couple living what seems to be a dream life, only to later learn all is not what it seems.

Emily Blunt plays Rachel, the “girl” on the train. Rachel is one of three narrators, the others being Megan , whose life is the object of Rachel’s curiosity, and Anna, who has taken Rachel’s place as the wife of Tom. We are, in short, in the world of the unreliable narrator, where no-one is to be entirely trusted. Can Rachel believe her eyes? Can we believe her? From Rear Window onwards it is an irresistible, tried and tested set-up, so why in this case does it not work as it might?

It is not just because the director here is Taylor (The Help, Get on Up) and not, as in Gone Girl, David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven, The Social Network), although that is a pretty big factor. Fincher’s picture, like Gillian Flynn’s book, was tight as a drum and cleverly constructed. The Girl on the Train, perhaps because it has more narrators to juggle, is sprawling and jumpy, with a timeline that hops, confusingly, all over the place.

But Taylor, like Fincher, knows how to shoot a handsome film. Even that turns out to be a mixed blessing, however. A chief problem with the film version of The Girl on the Train is that it has been glammed up. In place of bloated, boozy Rachel the picture has the lithe and beautiful Emily Blunt, the possessor of movie star looks that no amount of dark shadows painted under her eyes can diminish.

More problematic still, the action has been shifted from London commuter land to the east coast of America. Crammed together, semi-detached homes close to the line into Euston have been replaced by fabulous, straight out of a magazine, houses en route to Grand Central in Manhattan. Instead of drinking ready mixed G&Ts out of the tin, Rachel sups martinis with olives, or decants her vodka into a trendy water bottle. The claustrophobic tone of the book, the whiff of seediness, are missing and the film suffers for it.

The location change feeds into the tone of Taylor’s film, and not in a good way. The book zips along so fast one barely pauses to think too much about the events portrayed; on screen, the story chugs along with all the grace of a potboiler. Or given how many crazed women populate the piece, make that a bunny-boiler. At times, The Girl on the Train makes Fatal Attraction seem positively subdued.

The high point in the movie is Blunt’s performance, which towers above everything else on screen. Despite the odds being against her, Blunt powers the picture along, proving what star quality looks like in action. She makes a terrific Rachel, and despite the switch in setting, she keeps her English accent. If only the filmmakers had possessed the same faith in the rest of the book.

The question is whether Blunt’s performance will be enough to save the picture in the eyes of the book’s fans. Therein lies the rub. If you have read the book, you know what happens. What fans want is to see their imaginings realised on screen, for the old thrills to become new again. Will The Girl on the Train satisfy that urge?