The Girl on the Train (2016)

(Video On-Demand, January 2017) Anyone looking for a dark thriller should be pleased by The Girl on the Train, but I don’t think anyone will remember it six months later. The story of a damaged woman who is revealed to be embroiled in a complex web of obsession, abuse and guilt, this thriller has so much fun raising all sorts of false leads and dark portents that by the time the conclusion comes, it’s almost a linear let-down. Still, Emily Blunt brings a studied vulnerability to the lead character, and the film doesn’t settle for any easy hero/villain classification when even the protagonist suspects herself of being a murderer. Events get impressively twisted in the second half, with the gloomy cinematography not helping lift the sombre veil hovering over the film. Unfortunately, the pile-up of memory games and criss-crossed relationship eventually blurs into a gray fog—much like the blacked-out drunk heroine, it’s a challenge to explain the plot even a few days after seeing the film. For that reason, I expect that The Girl on the Train won’t have much of a long shelf life other than being an adequate watch-and-forget thriller. It could have been worse but, on the other hand, there’s no use trying to compare this with Gone Girl or other better thrillers of late.