The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor 2016)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Girl on the Train (2016) is not the way Tate Taylor translates this gaslight melodrama hokum, mixed with a bit of Rear Window and The 4.50 from Paddington, not merely into a contemporary setting but also into a work of significance through a brilliant central performance by Emily Blunt, made all the more endearing when, in the first scene she shares with Luke Evans, both of them temporarily forget their American accents (although his oddly slips back into English rather than Welsh), through studied pacing, through a narrative and temporal slipperiness that makes the plot holes look like enigmas rather than plot holes, and through serious-looking but trivialising invocations of trauma, addiction and therapy, no, the best thing about The Girl on the Train is the way in which, in an era in which political correctness has not only gone mad but is rampaging like a berserker through American culture, as we can see from the current Presidential election, it has has the balls-to-the-wall guts to base its narrative in the scientific truths of sociobiology: that men are driven by the swashbuckling need to put their dicks in every woman they meet, especially if in doing so they can dominate a) other women that a sick society forces them into providing for financially even when they cannot produce offspring or are not always available for penetration, and b) other men, particularly if they live next door; and that the only goal, drive and desire of women is to reproduce – and possibly to be blonde, since things seem to go better for blondes than brunettes, at least for a while…