YMMV / The Girl on the Train

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • With the reveal that Tom emotionally abused Rachel, this puts Anna into a new light. Was she too manipulated and conditioned like that? How much of her belief that Rachel is after her is down to her own paranoia? It's entirely possible that Anna has a victim complex - and tries to make things all about her. One very telling moment is when Rachel merely walks past her in the neighbourhood, but Anna later claims to Tom that Rachel got aggressive on her.
  • Scott and Megan's relationship is subject to a lot of interpretation, as most of what we have to go on are Megan's words to her therapist. She claims that Scott is emotionally abusive - but how much of that is her exaggerating the facts to win sympathy from her therapist? Scott is toned down considerably in the film where instead of locking Rachel in a room when he finds out the truth, just grabs her by the throat before breaking off. There are definite signs that Scott has a temper, so it's entirely up in the air if he was actually physically abusive as well. The only time he gets violent is when he has discovered that a) his wife was pregnant by another man, b) she was murdered and c) a woman he had been confiding in had lied to him all along. Note that Megan reveals the truth about her first baby to her therapist but not her husband.
  • And how much of what Megan tells the therapist is exaggerated to justify the affair she's having? By claiming that she's emotionally abused, is she invoking Good Adultery, Bad Adultery? Furthermore, how do we know that she's not actually talking about Tom and not Scott?
• Award Snub: Emily Blunt was nominated for the 2016 BAFTA and SAG awards for Best Actress, and was in the running for an Oscar nomination, but was left out. The highly competitive Best Actress race that year, as well as the film's mixed reception, are probably to blame. Notably though, Blunt's performance received high praise, even from those who otherwise disliked the film.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • In the movie there's Officer Riley's line about the numerous phonecalls Tom is allegedly getting from Rachel - "maybe he likes the attention" - which reminds Anna that she was an adulteress who helped break up a marriage, and thus isn't as much of a victim as she claims to be.
  • Rachel killing Tom after years of abuse and conditioning. He's such a vile character that it's very satisfying to see Rachel finally get revenge. In the movie, Anna helping finish him off also counts. As well as the look Rachel and Anna exchange after as the latter finally understands the former.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A lot of the praise for the film went to Allison Janney as Officer Riley. When promoting the film, Emily Blunt called Allison the real star of the movie - saying "I'm waiting for her starring role."
• Funny Moments: Just before Megan's murder, there is a bit of Black Comedy when she tells Tom she's keeping her baby.
  "You were a shitty nanny. What makes you think you'll be a good mother?"
  • The red-haired guy summing up that night when he found Rachel.
  "You were there, you were wasted. I tried to help you, you told me to fuck off. So I fucked off."
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When Tom hears that Megan quit being their nanny, he says to Anna "it's a shame, you and her made a good team." He clearly means that as a little jibe that he's sleeping with both of them. And later Anna and Rachel both kill him together - and Anna's testimony helps clear Rachel of any guilt - making a good team themselves.
  • Also, just before that, Anna is angry at Megan for quitting her job as a nanny. Megan suggests that Anna goes back to work, saying it's actually better for the baby. Anna snaps, "How would you know?" and Megan looks visibly pained. Because she accidentally killed her own baby when she fell asleep in the bathtub and let her go. Anna didn't know this of course, but still, ouch.
  • Megan tells her therapist about Scott's abuse of her. It's later revealed that the guy she was cheating on Scott with is the one that killed her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Rebecca Ferguson starred in both this and Florence Foster Jenkins playing the unlucky other woman. As of The Greatest Showman, that makes it three times.
  • Alison Janney in a film featuring a therapist and Gaslighting. The same year she also starred in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children where she's a demon posing as a therapist.
• Hollywood Homely: Emily Blunt frequently went on about her Beauty Inversion for the role. Even though Rachel is supposed to be a mess, she still gets a major helping of Adaptational Attractiveness. So she's still Emily Blunt just with Messy Hair and baggy clothes.
• Jerkass Woobie: Scott seems to be an emotionally abusive Jerkass but he also seems genuinely devastated by his wife's death. What's more is that he hides out at Rachel's house one night - a woman he barely knows - because he can't handle getting hounded by the press outside his own home.
• Narm:
  • Tom's death in the movie, while exactly as it was in the book, can induce some laughter. Rachel stabs him in the neck with a corkscrew and blood starts pouring down the spout in a comical way.
  • There's also Anna watching the whole scene from a distance. It made sense in the book, where it's made clear that Anna is trying to pretend everything is fine so as not to scare the baby. In the film it just looks like Anna is mostly indifferent, and she only helps once Tom is definitely stabbed.
• Nightmare Fuel: The murder of Megan. Jesus. After Tom hits her and briefly knocks her out, he begins dragging her to the dirt pile to bury her. Megan regains consciousness, sees where she is, and realises pretty quickly what Tom intends to do with her. She begins screaming in an absolute panic, before Tom bludgeons her with a rock, repeatedly, never displaying any kind of emotion other than grim determination. Not to mention with all this happening that she's pregnant with his baby, making Tom a murderer of two people.
• One-Scene Wonder: In the movie there's Lisa Kudrow in two scenes as Martha, the wife of Tom's former boss. The screen time isn't big, but she supplies a vital bit of information.
  • Also, Laura Prepon as Rachel's roommate.
• Paranoia Fuel: Rachel discovers that Tom had been lying to her about what she did during her blackouts and used that to mess with her mind. She spent years thinking that she had made a scene at a party and got violent on someone - when all she had actually done was get sick and pass out. This leads to Rachel questioning everything she thinks she knows about herself.
• Tearjerker:
  • Megan revealing what happened to her baby - they took a bath together and the girl drowned when Megan fell asleep.
  • Rachel's monologue to Dr. Kamal about her downward spiral. Props to Emily Blunt.
  • Everything about Megan, really. A poor girl who got pregnant at seventeen, fell in love with her baby but then accidentally let it die, and as an adult is still so scarred that she can't even ponder having kids because the memory is so terrible, alienating her husband. In retrospect, you realize she showers after nannying because just the smell of someone's baby is too much.
    Megan: I thought it would be hard, but it wasn't, because I loved her.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many reviewers noted that this movie has very good subplots and performances that were held back from the directionless main plot.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Anna is meant to come across as a lot more sympathetic than she actually is. Because she has No Sympathy for a woman who a) found out she was barren, b) got cheated on by her husband, c) was forced to move out of her own home to make room for the new wife and d) is now a functioning alcoholic - plus the fact that Anna is the one whom Tom cheated on Rachel with - a lot of readers can't feel sorry for her being afraid that Rachel is after her. It comes across as Laser-Guided Karma.
• The Woobie:
  • Rachel's life fell apart when it was revealed she was barren, and she eventually discovered her husband was having an affair. She has no friends, no hobbies and pretty much nothing to live for. With the reveal that she was emotionally abused by Tom, it only increases her Woobie status.
  • Megan's life was a big Trauma Conga Line. She lost her brother and is in an emotionally destructive relationship with Scott. She clearly hates herself and was left broken by the accidental death of her baby daughter, and the father of said child abandoned her after they buried her body. Then of course she dies, horribly, just as she's turning her life around.

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