The Girl on the Train was a terrible book and now it’s been made into a terrible film. Now don’t get me wrong, there was always the kernel of a good idea within Paula Hawkins’ turd of a novel. A voyeur on a train gets embroiled in a murder mystery (it’s like Rear Window...with wheels!). But the story is so melodramatic, the characters so annoying and unlikeable, and the twists and turns so predictable and mundane, that it’s a wasted exercise. Had the filmmakers been serious about making a decent film they should have thrown the book out of a moving train. Just take the basic premise and do your own thing.

The changes that have been made are cosmetic and end up hurting the movie. The book is set in and around suburban London. The movie is set in and around suburban New York. The filmmakers have instantly made things harder for themselves. The idea is that a woman on a train becomes obsessed with a couple she sees out of the window. In the London area this is just about plausible. On my old commuter line it would seem like you were going through people’s back gardens. But in upstate New York the houses are much farther away. There’s much more space. You’d need binocular vision to be able to see anything going on.

So I was immediately calling bullshit on the whole thing. There’s no way this woman could see what was going on inside these houses. Especially when she’s pissed out of her head most of the time. In one particularly egregious moment, she even sees a couple taking a selfie while they were inside their house. It was completely laughable.

The casting too is all wrong. In the book Rachel is worn out and overweight because of years of drinking. In the movie she’s played by Emily Blunt, who, like most young actresses, is thin as a rake. She tries her best to look haggard and shitty, but she doesn’t look like she’s had a hard life. She just looks tired.

Another poor piece of casting is the girl who plays Megan Hipwell. Megan is supposed to be this super sexy young woman that all of the women are jealous of and all the men want to fuck. But the actress here looks like she’s about 15. She pouts and she sulks, but she’s not remotely interesting. And it’s not like she’s super curvaceous to make up for the complete lack of personality. She’s an average blonde girl, the likes of which are two a penny in New York. So the fact that three different men go bananas over this woman boggles the mind.

Megan even manages to bewitch her therapist. At one point, like something out of a telenovela, he starts screaming in Spanish about her driving him out of his mind while she does some dopey shit like squinting in the sunlight and rubbing herself.

I also found it hilarious that they cast a Venezuelan actor in the therapist role. The therapist’s name is Kamal Abdic. I was kind of expecting a Middle Eastern actor, not a Spanish speaker. Seriously, it you really wanted this actor playing the role, why not change the name? It’s just too jarring. I kept thinking to myself, ‘How is this guy named Kamal?’ Now I’m sure that some fans of the book (poor, sad people) would bristle at the idea of changing Kamal’s name, but this is hardly Dickens, is it? Change whatever you like.

Now because Megan is oversexed and because this is a thriller, she dies a horrible, violent death. You see, not only is she married to a jealous beefcake who has skin so red that he must constantly be slapping himself, and not only is she fucking her therapist, but she also has something going on with Rachel’s ex-husband. They fuck in the woods up against the poor humiliated trees and everything is oh so hot and sexy...until he bashes her brains in with a rock. The murder is actually pretty tough to watch but, really...who cares? All of these people are irremediably shallow and annoying.

My least favourite character is Anna. She’s married to Rachel’s ex-husband and lives in Rachel’s old house. She’s also Megan’s employer, as Megan has a job there as a nanny. At the beginning Anna says that being a mother is the most important job in the world. This despite the fact that she has a full-time nanny to look after her kid while she goes to the Farmer’s Market. Apparently the wee little kid, like any good suburban baby, has allergies and can’t subsist on peasant food. She needs the good stuff. The natural stuff. And apparently she’s too good to get in a car with her mother or on a bus. Fucking suburban assholes who have the luxury of dumping their kid on paid staff. Anyone else would have to drag their kid along everywhere or give them to granny or grandpa.

Sudden brainwave. Why doesn’t Anna just order all of this fancy food online? That way she could spend more time worrying about vaccines and researching delicious cake recipes that don’t have sugar or flour amongst the ingredients.

At least Megan has the right idea and says that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life changing diapers or doing laundry. What she wants is cock. Lots and lots of cock. Which is why she has to die and drive the plot of this idiotic film.

In the book, when Rachel finally gets embroiled in the murder mystery, you at least get the sense that she’s on some kind of mission. There’s some sort of purpose and some sort of narrative drive. But here the film just drags its way to the feeble, Hallmark-level conclusion.

I kind of feel like there’s an excellent Shannon Tweed movie hiding here. But as a big budget thriller, it’s an embarrassment. The direction, in particular, is dreadful and makes it seem like the filmmaker is barely sentient. Every single choice is the wrong one. Somewhere Hitchcock is laughing his ass off.