Twisted and joyless

The chief pleasure to be had from The Girl on the Train, a hard R-rated thriller with hard R-rated scenes of sex and violence, is the same that could be found on a good episode of Law & Order.

The players, briefly and superficially defined, act out their parts well enough. In Rachel (Emily Blunt), we have the woman scorned, though her fury creates more hell for herself than it does for anybody else. The younger, more beautiful woman who supplanted Rachel and now lives in her house with Rachel's ex-husband is Anna (Mission: Impossible’s Rebecca Ferguson). Younger and more beautiful still is Megan (Haley Bennett). Anytime you see a man on screen, there’s a good chance Megan will at some point sleep with him. But she does actually serve a purpose in this story—it’s her disappearance at the beginning of the film that sets in motion the disturbing events to come.

The twists and revelations, told in a sometimes-confusing flashback fashion, unfold in ways surprising enough to keep our curiosity engaged. But it’s the shallow curiosity of a whodunit. We want to know what happens, but we care little about the impact it has on the characters.

Rachel, who rides by her own former house during her commute to the city every day and sees her ex-husband’s new wife and baby living in it, is the most sympathetic. Drowning in the despair of alcoholism and grief over her lost marriage and inability to have children, she is at her most interesting as she grapples with the levels of degradation she may or may not have sunk to during her blackout drunks.

But despite Blunt’s almost uncomfortably realistic performance, the film spends relatively little time giving us more of Rachel than her sadness. And by the end, as we come to understand her more, even those things that made her relatable and sympathetic are undercut. What we come away with is a feeling of cold indifference. Much like 2014’s Gone Girl, this is a story awash in bleakness with very little to hope for in the end. It’s a lot of ugliness to wallow in for the simple satisfaction of finding out who killed Megan Hipwell.

Like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train is based on a best-selling novel in a genre being termed “Grip Lit.” That is, excessively sinister thrillers whose sales are driven largely by women between the ages of 25 and 34. These books and the blockbuster movies they become bring up the interesting question of why women’s popular taste in stories seems to have grown so joyless in recent years. Gone are the materialistic fantasies of Danielle Steel, replaced by the self-injuring cynicism of Gillian Flynn.

For all its mediocrity, a likely unintentional subtext running through The Girl on the Train could help explain the trend. This is a movie constantly preoccupied by anguish over babies. Wanting babies, worrying for babies, devastation over the loss of babies.

At one point a character demands that another get an abortion, and we understand that this is shorthand, showing us that the man is a monster. I doubt the filmmakers intended the connection, but so much unspoken angst over what having and not having babies does to the heart of women certainly suggests something about how art targeted at young women could have grown so twisted and unhappy in the last 43 years.