The Good Girl. The Girl With the Gifts. The Girl in the Ice. The Girl You Lost. Luckiest Girl Alive. We can probably blame Stieg Larsson and Gillian Flynn, but the massive success of their respective thriller novels (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl) seemingly prompted a tidal wave of authors to think the key to success was including “Girl” somewhere in their titles. It’s unclear if that strategy actually worked, but there has been at least one that managed to break away from the pack and become a bestseller.
Paula Hawkins’ first thriller, The Girl on the Train, caught on with readers and became a big seller, and it wasn’t long before the film rights were snapped up too. The story follows a woman (Emily Blunt) struggling in the wake of divorce who spends her daily commute imagining a perfectly happy love life for a couple she sees from the window. When the woman disappears she claims to have witnessed the possible abduction from the moving train car, but her memory and motives are called into question as details about both her life and the life of the missing girl come into focus.
The movie doesn’t hit screens until October, but the first trailer has just dropped. Check it out below.
There’s both good and bad in the trailer, but we can all agree that auto-tune is the work of the devil right? Okay, good, moving on.
There’s a definite Gone Girl vibe here as the trailer suggests the story is being told from differing perspectives — one possibly being imagined — but Blunt’s character seems far less sure of herself than Ben Affleck’s did. She’s suffering from alcohol-fueled blackouts, has an obvious motive, and seems somewhat unstable — so I’m guessing she didn’t do it. Plot twists and generic thrills come fast and furious, but they’re all made palatable in part by a pretty strong cast.
Blunt is obviously enough to get me into theaters, especially if you tell me she’ll be riding a train, but the others are equally compelling including Rebecca Ferguson, Allison Janney, Lisa Kudrow, Laura Prepon, Luke Evans, and Justin Theroux. Director Tate Taylor is more of a wild card though as this is his first stab at a thriller after previously helming The Help and Get on Up.
I haven’t read The Girl on the Train, but speaking strictly as a movie lover I feel like too much is given away in this first trailer. Hopefully the film has far more to say when it starts laying track on October 7th, 2016.
Related Topics: Trailers
