Review of the film Girl on the Train: Parineeti Chopra’s film has the subtlety of the Shatabadi Express

Mira Kapoor is a train girl. She is exuberant. Armed with a hip flask, in which deep inroads are often made. Thick kohl-stained eyes, tongue drawn, brain foggy. She takes the same train, going back and forth from London to the suburbs, every day. Every day, she passes by her old house, which falls along the tracks, where a beautiful woman lives that Mira envies. And then, one day, that woman disappears. A body is found in the forest. And the questions abound.

This latest edition of ‘The Girl On The Train’ comes after the Hollywood version of the same name in which Emily Blunt plays the alcoholic stalker with a dark past, which in turn was based on the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. The use of ‘girl’ in the title may have been used to remind you of ‘Gone Girl’, in which Gillian Flynn gave us a warm approach to the sensual and sensual girl who uses her wiles to find a way out of problems. (He also released an infinite series of thrillers with ‘girl’ in the title.) Hawkins’ girl was not as smart as Flynn’s, but there was something fascinating about the way she let us get into her head, although the film also there was a lot going on – a lot of characters, a lot of spilling vodka, a lot of red herring. It was Blunt’s performance, even if it wasn’t the best, that continued the film.

The problem with Mira de Parineeti Chopra is that you never buy it completely. Like the girl with unsolved traumas trying to put her broken marriage behind, the actor looks perfect. He thought a lot about the disheveled hair, the stained kajal, the bloodshot eyes. But it was not written in sufficient depth. We have no idea who Mira is, before and after meeting the smart Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary), who won her over before the first song was released. Yes, there are songs in the film. A Bollywood adaptation of a murder mystery without ‘naach-gaana’ in 2021? The thought perishes. This is also why the film is two hours long.

The exaggerated newsroom disappoints the plot, which in any case is full of seemingly unrelated characters coming and going: a very responsible policeman (Kriti Kulhari) is assigned to the case, a mysterious photographer crawls through the same forest where the body is found ; a blackmail spot is in the air; a very friendly psychiatrist (Roy Chowdhury) appears briefly, as does a desi mobster. The characters come, and before we can time them, they go. And Nusrat (Aditi Rao Hydari), the beautiful woman who sets everything in motion, could easily be a ghost, she is so insubstantial.

It is only after a good hour that the exhausted Chopra calms down, to go a little deeper into his role and deliver moments when you can see the girl’s pain, even if fleeting. And then the film returns to its agitated devices, with a climax that is difficult to swallow. Somewhere in the film, Mira is seen at Paddington Station, and you return to Agatha Christie’s near-perfect thriller, ‘4.50 From Paddington’, which is also about a crime being witnessed from a train compartment. Now this is writing. Here, you can see the dialogue approaching. At one point, Chopra’s character says ‘mujhe apna past nahin badalna’, and you know, before she opens her mouth, she’ll say, ‘I want to change my gift’.

And this, even better, again from Chopra: “main usko kabhi nahin beat paayi ki woh main nahin, mere tha wound (I could never tell him it wasn’t me, it was my wound)”. You do not say.