The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor, 2016)

Emily Blunt stars as an alcoholic woman near mental collapse who keeps on taking the same train every day back and forth past the house of what she believes is the perfect couple, a dream that she hasn't been able to attain. This is the more solid part of the film adaptation of Paula Hawkins's bestseller, largely due to a very convincing portrayal of degraded, pitiful dependency and obsession by Blunt. However, the rest of the film struggles to match that level as the woman she has been spying on from the train goes missing and she, with her regular blackouts and constant revisiting of her ex-husband, becomes a suspect. It slides all too easily into schlock psycho film territory, and gets too much for Blunt alone to keep afloat. It has been frequently compared to Gone Girl, with some similarities in subject matter, but lacks most of that film and novel's Hitchcockian dramatic twists and tension.

5/10