A troubled alcoholic struggles with trying to remember the events of a disappearance that she witnessed. Based on the best-selling novel, “The Girl on the Train” is the story of Rachel Watson’s (Emily Blunt) life post-divorce. Every day, she takes the train in to work in New York, and every day the train passes by her old house. The house she lived in with her husband (Justin Theroux), who still lives there, with his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson) and child. As she attempts to not focus on her pain, she starts watching a couple who live a few houses down; Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott Hipwell (Luke Evans). She creates a wonderful dream life for them in her head, about how they are a perfect happy family. And then one day, as the train passes, she sees something shocking, filling her with rage. The next day, she wakes up with a horrible hangover, various wounds and bruises, and no memory of the night before. She has only a feeling: something bad happened. Then come the TV reports: Megan is missing. Rachel becomes invested in the case and trying to find out what happened to Megan, where she is, and what exactly she herself was up to that same night Megan went missing. “The Girl on the Train” is directed by Tate Taylor, and is rated R for violence, sexual content involving nudity, and adult language.

As a reader and fan of the novel that the movie is based on, I was curious to take in Tate Taylor’s vision of a story with so many twists and turns in an unreliable narrative, and while this movie is a passing effort, it does suffer greatly from a translation that forgets to include the most basic of concepts. The biggest one here being character motivations. The movie depicts scene after scene of changing atmosphere to always keep the audience guessing, but it fails to interpret that faint voice that is screaming inside of the head of Rachel. The opening scene is solid in displaying the real effects of loneliness and just how torturous of a road it is to recovery, but her character feels like just another face in the growing crowd of expressionless mannequins. Rachel’s feelings inside are perhaps the most important aspect to this story, and the audience deserves to know why she jumps to the most drastic of conclusions. Something that felt comfortable with the novel, considering we are standing next to her every painful step of the way.

Another major problem that I had was some of the diagraming in logic being left out of some of the more important scenarios. I won’t spoil anything, but a novel will always have an advantage over its multimedia counterpart simply because it has more time to include all of the important details. With that concept and this movie, I noticed a lot of scenes happening in the background with very little exposition. There are scenes in the movie in which we hear a lot of the detective’s theories, but we never understand how they arrived at these conclusions. The most important of scenes from the novel are virtually non-existent and produce a rather obvious hole in each of the subplots that they represent. Imagine singing the alphabet, and you try to get from A to Z with L, M, N, O and P being left out. How did we arrive at such a conclusion that comes out of virtually nowhere? This won’t be a problem to people who haven’t read the novel, but will be like a burning glare to anyone fortunate enough to dabble in the better narrative first.

Not everything is negative however, about this adaptation, as the casting is truly magnificent. I had my doubts when I first heard that Emily Blunt was cast as the main protagonist. Not because she’s a terrible actress or anything, but because I just don’t see her as the train-wreck described in the novel. After seeing her performance, I can thankfully rejoice in being wrong on this one. Blunt performs what can only be described as an Oscar worthy performance by really involving every bit of her body in the role. Her facial expressions lack any kind of life, as her eyes serve as the only kind of color in an otherwise flushed skin tone. The makeup work here is subtle, but detailed in the fact that eye shadow is used to cover up the pain and suffering behind eyes that witness the kind of things that her mind doesn’t always record. Rachel’s battle with the bottle is one of great sadness, and even through some ridiculous actions, you find yourself hoping for the best in this woman who is killing herself one sip at a time. The rest of the cast is also right on par with the kind of traits described within the pages, but one stands above the rest, and that is Haley Bennett. Haley continues to steal movie after movie this year, with roles in “Hardcore Henry” and “The Magnificent Seven”. Here, she dazzles as Megan, a girl who has endured so much heartbreak at such a young age. The biggest poison that is plaguing Megan is repetition of every day. A problem that is painfully rendering because how do you run from routine? Bennett captivated the screen any time she is in front of our eyes, and really surrenders a gentle seduction before tearing down the walls of every pre-conceived notion about the character that you may have had ten minutes prior.

The musical score is also of great importance to a story with such rich backgrounds. The light touch of classical atmospheres presented by musical guru Danny Elfman really accomplish par in feelings for the scenes they accompany. There is certainly a comparison to “Gone Girl’s” melancholy piano that never seems to quit playing through scene-by-scene transitions, but I think it works for these kind of murder mysteries that always seem to be relaying that something bad is being hidden in every location. There’s great embrace to such ominous tones being presented, and Elfman has always been a maestro of setting the mood just right for the story that plays out before our very eyes. The music that is being played while on the train scenes smoothly presented a fantasy of sorts for a world where our character feels the most protected; silently cast away in a 70 MPH boxcar where she clings to a window in search of what once was.

As for differences from the novel, there isn’t anything of major alternative here. Really just how every end result kind of takes the shortcut to get to its finishing point. That isn’t always a problem, in fact, I was applauding a lot of the editing of scenes that involved pointless exchanges between Rachel and her roommate Cathy (Played by Laura Prepon) that really serve as nothing more than another world falling down around Rachel. There’s certainly enough of that to go around in this story, and I applaud screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson for knowing what to leave out as expositional fluff. At 107 minutes, the story has enough angles and leg room to present its newest audience to always keep them guessing. It’s in the blank page audience who will attain the most from this story, and the fast paced thriller has enough gas creatively to always keep the engine burning, wiggling through clue after clue of many picket fences lives, and just how different things can be when those fences are closed.

“The Girl on the Train” struggles to find the same kind of magic that won over many with its literary presentation, but there’s enough glow in the performances of Blunt and Bennett, as well as a juicy R-rating that never disappoints for an adult kind of bedtime story. Taylor’s adaptation reveals to us that to know the whole story you really must look closer. A concept that echoes through more than one household just off a rattling track.

6/10