The Girl on the Train

Apparently the film rights were acquired to Paula Hawkins’s ’The Girl on the Train’ before it was even published. Obviously they'd had a premonition that it would be a big hit and they’d have ‘Gone Girl 2’ on their hands. So before they’d realised that its very British setting would be a key reason why it was taken to its reader’s hearts they’d already exported it to America.

So out goes the grim commute through the London suburbs with terraces and semis backing on to the line and in comes upscale New York with its mansions and lush green gardens. Oddly Rachel even gets a seat for the whole journey. Everything is completely Americanised bar oddly our lead character Rachel, a professional drunk, played by the very British Emily Blunt.

Now we've all done the daily commute to work at some point. The same places, the same faces, the same overheard conversations, the same overheard music, day after day. It’s enough to drive you to drink. Well Rachel loses her job but still does her commute for reasons only she can rationalise. Perhaps rail season tickets are cheaper in New York than they are in London?

 

Every day she gazes into the homes that pass by her window, swigging her vodka from her drinks bottle as she goes, and becomes particularly obsessed with one couple Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett) who she sees groping each other on their balcony.

Ironically they live only a few doors down from her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) is now shacked up with a newer blonder model in Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Rachel imagines that both these women have it all or in Anna’s case both Rachel’s ex and the baby she couldn’t have. Rachel becomes a professional stalker.

The film, more so that the book, has come under fire for its portrayal of women and it’s true that all three women are hardly role models for female empowerment. They are all essentially victims of their own men, who are naturally deceitful and controlling, and perhaps (whisper it quietly) themselves. In fact the whole lot of them, the men as well, are messed up beautiful people with too much time on their hands. Only one of the three women works, part-time, sometimes.  So unable to get their collective acts together it’s perhaps not surprising that they have affairs with each other instead.

It’s certainly not a feminine drama even if there is a lot of talk about babies even from Megan, a borderline nymphomaniac who is so messed up that she starts seeing a therapist Dr Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez). However once it dawns on Megan that her therapist is a man rather than just a therapist, she tries to seduce him as well, naturally.

Then Megan goes missing and Rachel finds herself embroiled in the police investigation as a potential witness too drunk to know what she’s witnessed.

So it’s a cocktail of real life. You know infidelity, alcoholism, chauvinism, voyeurism, lust, lies, manipulation, murder... it’s a checklist of all the things you'd perhaps like to get away with but can't and don't obviously and of course you're not even allowed to think any of these things out loud anymore. I thought it was wonderfully entertaining.

Throw in an absurd amount of sex scenes just for good measure, preferably involving trees, and it’ll be just about perfect. Oh, they did that as well.

The plot itself is fairly transparent even if you haven't read the book, well at least I thought it was, because the murderer looks like a murderer from the moment you first see them on screen.

The acting isn’t too shabby especially from Blunt. Rachel looks dreadful most of the time, half dead mostly, which is a credit to Blunt who can do this look in her sleep. I would recommend it but it’s probably best watched Rachel style with a drink in hand.

The Girl With All The Gifts

‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ is adapted from the 2014 best-selling novel by Mike Carey who also had a hand in the screenplay alongside director Colm McCarthy.

The film opens with children being strapped into their chairs and being wheeled under armed military guard to their school classroom. Clearly in the future all truancy problems have been solved.

Well, not quite. What we have here is a futuristic tale that is a slight variant on the currently fashionable zombie film genre. The zombies which inhabit this world have been created by a fungal infection but act pretty much like your stereotypical zombie. e.g. see a human, chase it down and eat it.

However these children appear to be different. They were infected while still in the womb and evolved into a next generation who think more like humans but still have the overpowering desire to eat human flesh. 

The remaining 'real' humans have managed to stay safe from them by using blocking gel to mask the tantalising smell of their own flesh and, of course, by locking the children up while they try and find a way forward.

For Dr Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) the way forward is to find a vaccine and that is how Melanie (Sennia Nanua), seemingly the most intelligent of the bunch, eventually ends up strapped to the Dr’s examination table about to be chopped up in the name of science.

The group’s teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) prefers a different approach. She sees enormous potential in working with these children and when the military base where they are housed is overrun by the undead, she is the one who rescues Melanie.

A group of them are now on the run under the command of Sergeant Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) who would rather just obliterate them all. Melanie repays her teacher’s kindness by helping the group stay safe by distracting the hordes of zombies who lurk in the streets.

Along the way they find out that the fungal infection will eventually move onto a second even more disastrous stage.

The film has an interesting concept but it’s problem is it really struggles to get this across and it’s very difficult to see where they are trying to go with the story. Although clearly it is trying to ask who is being the more humane... the humans or the new breed of zombies?

It also has the usual horror film problem of people doing nonsensical things and getting themselves killed. In this case, a soldier laying down his arms, his armour and his radio. Oops.

It’s not a bad film but I think it could clearly have been better. It’s also best avoided by cat and dog lovers.