The much-awaited suspense thriller The Girl on the Train is finally releasing on October 7 after a lot of hype surrounding it. Based on the 2015 book by the same name, the story is about Rachel, who is devastated by her recent divorce and spends her daily commute fantasizing about the seemingly perfect couple who live in a house that her train passes every day, until one morning she sees something shocking happen there and becomes entangled in the mystery that unfolds. The suspense thriller is directed by Tate taylor and stars Emily Blunt in the title role.
The reviews have started pouring in, and here is a look at the top ones from the world:
1. A filmmaker has a feel for this kind of storytelling or doesn’t, and the people behind The Girl on the Train don’t. – New York Magazine (Thumbs Down)
2. The cast, especially Blunt and Bennett, turn in fine, layered performances, and keep the “Train” on its tracks. Even if you know the story already, it’s well worth the ride. – Detroit News (Thumbs Up)
3. The film never quite succeeds, simply because the book’s core virtues do not lend themselves to cinema. – WallStreet Journal (Thumbs Down)
4. Taylor isn’t able to believably blend the overlapping perspectives and The Girl on the Train comes across as a flat, predictable puzzle whose characters flip from one extreme to another. – Associated Press (Thumbs Down)
5. It has about as many twists and turns as an L. The third act of a movie shouldn’t make you feel as though the first two acts were a waste of time. – New York Post (Thumbs Down)
6. It’s a movie that chugs along, smoothly and uneventfully, until it pulls into a station that could have been seen from a mile away, had you not already been lulled just to the edge of sleep. – Washington Post (Thumbs Down)
7. A flat and suspense-free tale of pretty people in peril.- RogerEbert.com (Thumbs Down)
8. “The Girl on the Train” deserves to be a minor guilty-pleasure hit, for its performances and hot-house plotting, and for its keeping of the compact of classic women’s films, where the heroine most wronged turns out to be most right.- Boston Globe (Thumbs Up)
9. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish.- NewYork Times (Thumbs Up)
10. It’s shiny trash that begins with promise but quickly gets tripped up by its own screenplay and grows increasingly ludicrous and melodramatic, to the point where I was barely able to suppress a chuckle at some of the final scenes. – Chicago SunTimes (Thumbs Down)
11. The movie gives away the game faster than the novel, but Emily Blunt digs so deep into the role of a blackout drunk and maybe murderer that she raises ‘Girl’ to the level of spellbinder. – Rolling Stone (Thumbs Up)
12. Wilson brings themes that are latent in the book to the surface in the film, exposes them to the harsh light to make them visually, cinematically real. – Tribune News Service (Thumbs Up)
13. Blunt gives Rachel multiple dimensions — we could never view her as just a stewy mess. But the movie’s surprise (or perhaps not-so-surprising) twist doesn’t serve its lead character well, at best merely justifying her stalkerish behavior.- TIME Magazine (Thumbs Down)
14. [Taylor] deftly translates the bleak, raw-boned menace and tricky time signatures of Train’s intertwined plotlines, and draws remarkably vivid performances from his cast, particularly his two female leads.- Entertainment Weekly (Thumbs Up)
15. The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and un-dimensional as to invite no curiosity about them. – Hollywood Reporter (Thumbs Down)
The reviews for The Girl On The Train are mixed to negative! Surprising for a book adaptation which was very much in news. Will Emily Blunt‘s performance save the day?!