People-watching is one of the modern American commuter’s proudest traditions, and an easy habit to master if you just remember one key strategy: Act casual. This rule generally prohibits getting caught staring, visiting your subjects at home, and — here’s a biggie, and one that Emily Blunt’s character in The Girl on The Train clearly overlooked — getting ensnared in any murders they may be carrying out.
As a result of getting too wrapped up in the ostensible disappearance of a relative stranger named Megan (Haley Bennett), things billow straight through hectic and into the terrain of disastrous for Blunt’s voyeuristic character Rachel in the first full trailer for the upcoming film. On the other hand, this might be the perfect opportunity for the actor herself, universally admired but somehow perpetually at arm’s length of genuine stardom, to establish herself at the head of a popular genre.
The past few years have seen a specific breed of the standard whodunit — the “Did he/she do it?” in which our main character is not the inspecting party, but the chief suspect — on the rise. Gone Girl is the obvious cinematic point of comparison to The Girl on the Train, though everything from the podcast Serial to the documentary series Making a Murderer to the new HBO drama The Night Of embodies our craving for these types of stories.
The trailer alone doesn’t offer enough to either absolve or indict Rachel, nor fellow plausible suspects like Megan’s husband (Luke Evans) and Rachel’s own ex (Justin Thoreaux). But it does provoke intrigue, thanks to a steady rise in chaos… and perhaps to the accompaniment of a remixed “Heartless” by Kanye West, whose very name connotes chaos right about now.
The Girl on the Train, directed by Tate Taylor and based on the novel by Paula Hawkins, hits theaters October 7.
