Weekly Film Review: The girl on the train

A film I can relate this to would be ‘Gone girl’ as the story plot is the same, but ‘the girl on the train’ had a few extra differences. The director of this film is Tate Taylor. The production line of this film was DreamWorks Pictures and they got the film rights from Paula Hawkins; who wrote the novel of ‘the girl on the train’ and Tate Taylor was hired to direct this play.

As known of the title, the opening starts off with the girl getting on the train. She starts talking, which shows the audience it’s a narrative story. As the film goes on we come to realise the film is narrated from three different women, first Rachel, then Anna and lastly Megan.  The cinematography presents the names of the girls before we actually see them, which signifies to the audience who they are and that they play a main role in the film. I believe there are three protagonists as you get through the movie realising they’re all victims and emotionally/physically abused by the man who once at one point loved him (Tom).  He had an affair with three individuals, which is explained how they are linked towards the end of the film. Every film has 7 plots, and this film is based on man against man (antagonist vs protagonists), which indicates that Tom is the antagonist and Megan, Rachel and Anna are the protagonists. ‘The girl on the train’ is basically a narrative story and the genre is Thriller. The themes that run along this whole film are love, lust, vulnerability and fear. 

The train plays a significance to the film as I predict the train connotes Rachel’s journey towards her ex-husband, she expresses it as her form of comfort watching her ex-husbands new family as something she still desires. This makes the audience aware that she still grieves for her husband, almost thinking that she is a threat to his new family, but by the micro feature of performance the audience discovers that she is an alcoholic so the audience become stuck to the idea that she is threatening. Later in the film, the performance demonstrated by Tom shows us he mentally and physically abusive to Anna (who he killed), Rachel (in the past and left her) and his new wife. Towards the end of the play, Rachel (out of defence) kills Tom, as she turns we hear the sound of the train railing past, this micro feature is known as an absence of light, but presence of sound. Then the film shows the train going past her whilst Tom lies dead on floor; this signifies that she was trapped on the train all this time and now that he has died, she has gained her freedom.