Rebecca Ferguson’s Classic Psychological Thriller Is Officially Streaming
Anthony Crislip has always loved movies and television, and has been published in outlets such as SlashFilm and Ultimate Classic Rock. While working as a film programmer or judge at a film festival, he has striven to develop interest in underseen films. He is a particular fan of digging deep into forgotten corners of film history.
One of the great unsung movies of both Emily Blunt and Rebecca Ferguson’s career is 2016’s The Girl on the Train, a twisty and suspenseful adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel of the same name. A moody, shadowy exploration of life beneath the comfortable existence of the suburbs, it follows Rachel Watson (Blunt) as the titular girl on the train, a depressed recovering alcoholic obsessed with her ex-husband and his wife, as well as their neighbors. Like Rear Window and its spiritual remake Disturbia, her obsession and voyeurism leads her down a dark path that is home to murderous and mysterious sights. In the grand tradition of suburban thrillers, not everything is as it seems. The idyllic lives that Rachel observes in passing have their own repressed feelings and horrific outcomes.
The train comes to stand in as a metaphor for escaping the suburbs, with the expectations they place on women becoming a prison. As Rachel fixates on the lives of ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (Ferguson), viewers are given intriguing glances into their homes. And Anna, despite having “won” the battle for Tom’s affection, is haunted by nightmares of Rachel (who struggled with infertility during her marriage to Tom) abducting their new child, with the implicit understanding that motherhood is effectively the sole thing keeping her in a protected position — although Rachel doesn’t help her case by continually drunk-dialing the new family. But the movie’s plot truly begins with a murder that sets both women against each other and threatens to break apart the comforting illusions on which both families have built their lives.
'Girl on the Train' Lets Rebecca Ferguson Play More Than The Trophy Wife
While The Girl on the Train is no Blue Velvet when it comes to digging into the perversions and twisted violence behind suburban life, it does have a lot in common with another masterful film: David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. While Fincher’s intense cynicism and compositional perfection elevated the movie from a traditional bestseller adaptation into a violent, unnerving, and frequently hilarious look at the lies a couple has to tell to keep things at an even keel, The Girl on the Train is more direct and straightforward. Emily Blunt’s unmoored, shaky, and heartbreaking performance carries it, especially as she learns that Tom and Anna’s neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) have been having an affair, carrying on in plain view of her train window.
Director Tate Taylor utilizes a fragmented editing style to convey Rachel’s drunken slipping through time and her own memories. Because Rachel is saddled with the burden of being unreliable — especially after she awakes in her bedroom covered in blood after Megan goes missing — Anna becomes something of a secret hero for the film. Rachel, blacking out and knowing her capacity for violence, can barely make sense of the horrors in which she finds herself. Anna, on the other hand, is self-assured and capable, the second wife who embodies a kind of perfect ideal that’s always at risk of slipping. Rebecca Ferguson turns Anna into a character that can be loathsome due to her perfection — and sympathetic when certain truths are unearthed.
Rebecca Ferguson and Emily Blunt Find Common Ground in 'Girl on the Train'
The movie’s use of repressed, foggy, and obscured memories to unearth its story is one way in which it rises above the suburban crime thriller genre. The Rachel and Anna rivalry is one built on gaslighting from Tom, who spent his marriage to Rachel telling her what "really" happened when she blacked out (which mostly meant creating false memories). Rachel’s investigation into the missing Megan reveals traumas and troubles that are both worse than and of a piece with what the other two women have experienced. As Rachel notes by movie’s end, the three women are “tied together.”
While Tate Taylor’s filmography might suggest that he’s a bad fit for this kind of material, with movies like The Help (which star Viola Davis came to regret) and Ma revealing a director who can sometimes let his movies’ tone get out of hand, he does turn The Girl on the Train into a memorable character piece with a literary feel. Anna’s complexity is one way in which the movie avoids falling into the typical cheap thriller traps; she's allowed to be much more than just the second wife. As played by Ferguson, who was fresh off of her landmark performance in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, she keeps her guard up, struggling with revelations about her husband that could destroy the fragile lifestyle she’s built. It’s only when those truths become too apparent to avoid that she must make her choice. The space given for Ferguson’s performance makes that moment all the more real.
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