44% on Rotten Tomatoes
Chloe's thoughts: Proceed at your own risk
Watch it if you: Really want to see how they adapted the novel; Want to see steamy (literally) sex scenes with Hayley Bennett
Rachel catches the same train every day, sitting in the exact same seat in the exact same carriage. Her dull life of routine monotony is made bearable by her vivid imagination, as she creates fictional stories for the people living behind the houses that she passes by every day. Yet one day, something so out of the ordinary occurs to her favourite couple that it shocks her to her core. Later, she discovers that Megan, the wife in her idealised couple, has gone missing. As she alerts the police of what she saw on the train, the situation spirals out of control and Rachel starts to wonder if she herself can be trusted.
I saw this trailer earlier this year and was so excited for it to be the next Gone Girl that I went and read the book. It was a pretty decent read, since I read it in about 4 days, so I wanted to watch the movie. I knew the reviews were terrible, but I felt like I still needed to watch the movie anyway (even though I always end up hating book adaptations).
This is definitely not one of those films where the critics were wrong. This was a pretty bad movie, and I would not recommend it.
The movie felt really long, even though it was 1 hour and 52 minutes total. But honestly, I was sighing and shifting in my seat uncomfortably even 15 minutes into the film; it was just SO BORING. I started worrying about the rest of the film.
The interesting part starts about 30 minutes into the film, but it feels like an hour into the movie. So when you look at your watch you have to give an even greater sigh at the thought of still being here for the next 1.5 hours, even though the scene you just saw was pretty interesting.
The main issue with the film is that they were just trying to overdo it. And by 'it', I mean everything.
Firstly with the acting. The acting was great, don't get me wrong; Emily Blunt was really good. But sometimes... she just went too far. It's a testament to her acting ability, with the camera trained on her for really dramatic long takes, however I just don't think the director gave them good direction, because some of these long long long monologues felt repetitive, slow, and way too long.
All of the other actors were good actors too. I don't think performance was ever the issue, but directing and writing. The script was quite bad at times, but at least the actors did what they could with it. I was happy to see Anna being portrayed by Rebecca Ferguson (the badass woman in yellow in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation), although sometimes I really did not like the performance by Hayley Benett (from the Magnificent Seven; sometimes referred to by others as Poor Man's Jennifer Lawrence). I'm not sure if it was deliberately meant to be so unemotional, but I wanted to sleep or just hit fast forward every time she was talking. I seriously did not care for her character at all, even though I did care for her when reading the novel.
Secondly with the transitioning. I really did not like the way they handled this. The novel jumps from the present to the past (from 6 months ago and then leading up to present day) and it also jumps between characters (Rachel, Megan and Anna), and the movie tried to emulate this but it was not executed well enough. The novel is done in a diary format, so I guess the filmmakers thought it would be necessary to tell the audiences what time period we were in with each scene, but the fact that the film jumped A LOT and that they didn't transition it well enough meant that it was STILL confusing. Which just means they were being lazy at not integrating the time jumps that well.
Another thing is that at each transition, they would also put a title card with the character's name on it.
Do you know how stupid that is?!?!? This is not a book where the narrator is talking in first person and so won't reveal their name; this is a movie where we can clearly SEE who the scene is focusing on. So they would have TWO title cards, one with the character name and then one with the time period, and then a scene that was not really well integrated into the film. Why not just have one title card with just the time period?
In the end, this is NOT the Gone Girl I was expecting it to be; I am seriously disappointed. Emily Blunt is amazing, but her performance gets lost in super long scenes and a poorly directed movie that had some serious potential to be great.
~SPOILER~ about the characters and ending:
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