The Girl On The Train (15) Blunt shines in a twisy thriller

(Flynn’s book is the more interesting and clever of the two, but they both get the job done.) Now the movie of “Girl on the Train” is here, right smack in the 2014 “Gone Girl” movie slot, and there’s a lot to recommend it, most notably a quavering, magnetic central performance by Emily Blunt.

Tate Taylor-who also directed The Help (2011), another drama with a powerful female ensemble-builds the mystery by toggling between Rachel, Megan and Anna and each of their stories, going backward and forward in time to pick up pieces of the fractured, fragmented puzzle. Such tactics – artificially withholding key information from viewers, for example – might work better on the written page than they do on the big screen. Though “The Girl on the Train” author Paula Hawkins may reject comparisons between her novel and “Gone Girl“, the similarities are hard to ignore.

You may have heard of The Girl On The Train as the number one best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins.

And this is no comedy.

This lack of connection and overall jarring storytelling robs The Girl on the Train of any suspense. Will it hold up if you already know the twist that’s coming? She’s a divorced drunk who is prone to blackouts and has never quite gotten over the split with her ex. It’s exhausting just watching her.

In all, “The Girl on the Train” is a carefully constructed thriller, with a slight Noir-esque, “Gas Light” feel about it.

To Rachel, a divorcee who can’t let go of the life she used to have, this flawless couple seems to have it all.

So to sum up: bad couple of years for Rachel. But when Anna complains that Rachel keeps calling the house and hanging up, Tom at times comes to her defense, telling his wife that Rachel isn’t risky, just “sad”.

She also observes the neighbours, Megan and Scott (Haley Bennett, Luke Evans), who seem like the perfect-in-love couple – at least, until the day Rachel spots Megan kissing a unusual man on the balcony. What I can tell you, is that it didn’t live up to my expectations or the hype.

Because this cinematic universe is small, we know the explanation has to lie among these half-dozen people. This betrayal, to her alcohol-fueled thinking, sends Rachel into a drunken rage, and she wakes the next morning bloody and bruised, with only brief flashes of memory from the night before. “And it kept changing”, Luke Evans said.

Bennett’s Megan is a tragic character, and when we learn the full, horrific reason why, Bennett delivers with a stunning monologue. Anna stays back, timid and protective of her baby. I’m not sure a young Meryl Streep could have made this role sing. The appointments between Megan and her psychiatrist are complete snoozefests (the later meetings with Rachel and Abdic are only slightly more interesting), and the investigation of Megan’s death is mostly relegated to Rachel reading news stories on her fellow subway passengers’ tablets. It’s not a bad performance, but it’s a awful, laughable role.

Further fuelling Rachel’s boozy downward spiral is the fact that Anna and Tom have a child together; another stab to the heart given Rachel couldn’t conceive with Tom despite numerous attempts at IVF.