Tag: Emily Blunt

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NOW PLAYING: Fantastical Visions

I Saw The TV Glow (Courtesy A24)

The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land. 

IF

Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.

Back to Black 

Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27. 

The Blue Angels

This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.

Flash Gordon

The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.

The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.

The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.

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The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

Hollywood is not exactly a place where justice flourishes. But aside from all of the sexual assault, and the way some white guys keep failing upward, one of the biggest injustices in Hollywood is the fact that there is no Academy Awards category for stunt work. 

I don’t know if you’ve looked at a movie lately, but stunt performers are getting more screen time than ever. Many great pioneers of cinema built their reputations on hair-raising stunts: Think Charlie Chaplin roller-skating backwards on the edge of an abyss in Modern Times, or Buster Keaton riding on a locomotive cow catcher, batting railroad ties off the tracks in The General. Jackie Chan, the king of the Hong Kong stunt performers, has broken so many bones his injuries were shown as outtakes in his film’s credit sequences. Chan’s pain became part of his star attraction. 

It’s not like stunt work is not artistic. Look at the greatest film of the 21st century, Mad Max: Fury Road, and tell me the pole cat attack, where the performers are swinging on 20-foot poles mounted on vehicles traveling 80 miles per hour, is not artistic. Even if you do define “art” more narrowly, there’s still the existence of technical categories like Best Sound Design and Best Visual Effects. Stunt work is every bit as necessary for the success of the film as the talented professionals in those categories.

And look, if you want to jazz up the rating of the Academy Awards (and who doesn’t want jazzier ratings?), adding categories where Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious could win something is just the ticket. 

One person who definitely agrees with me on this, the most pressing issue of our time, is director David Leitch. He’s a former stunt performer himself, having been at one time Brad Pitt’s stunt double of choice, before directing the star in Bullet Train. He’s also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise, which has taken fight choreography into the realm of modern dance. The Fall Guy is his love letter to the world of stunt performers. It’s the rare action movie that really feels like it’s made with love. 

It’s also relentlessly inside baseball because there’s nothing film people like more than films about themselves, or “self-reflexivity” in film theory-speak. The Fall Guy is ostensibly based on a TV series from the 1980s starring a post-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a stunt man who solves crimes. (In the 1980s, it was a requirement that every TV star had to solve crimes. But I digress.) In a weird way, The Fall Guy owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the 1971 romantic comedy about a film set that’s always on the verge of falling to pieces but never quite does.  

Leitch’s star is Ryan Gosling, and to say he’s perfect for the role of Colt Seavers is a profound understatement. The source material is a notoriously rich vein of Reagan ’80s masculinity, with Majors driving a truck and singing country music between bringing in bounties. Gosling brings some much needed Kenergy to the role. This Colt Seavers cries to Taylor Swift songs. There’s not too many actors who could convincingly make a phone confession of their love to their girlfriend, director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), while also fleeing from assassins in a stolen speedboat. 

Jody and Colt met years ago when she was a camera op and he was the preferred stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). While filming Tom’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, their relationship evolves from a semi-recurring, on-set fling (which is a fairly common thing in the film world) to something more serious. Then, producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Colt do another take of a dangerous high fall. Colt’s luck runs out, and he wakes up on a stretcher with a broken back. 

Eighteen months later, Colt is hiding out in Los Angeles, working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, when Gail catches up with him. Jody is directing her first big feature film, a passion project she and Gail have worked for years to put together. They need Colt for a big stunt, a dangerous cannon roll on a beach. Jody has personally asked for him, Gail says, to support her as she tries to make good on her first big break. More inside baseball: Jody’s “passion project” is apparently a remake of the 1983 movie Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a 3D debacle so notoriously awful it is nowadays only watched by sick cinematic masochists such as myself. 

Colt arrives on set in Sydney and pulls off the spectacular stunt, which in real life broke the Guinness World Record for most on-screen rolls by a car — a fact the film-within-a-film’s stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) points out. But Jody’s not happy to see Colt. She was crushed when he cut off contact after the accident, and tells him via bullhorn as she repeatedly sets him on fire. “That was perfect! Let’s do it again!” 

When Colt confronts Gail, she reveals the real reason he’s been brought on board. Tom Ryder has gone missing, and since he and Colt used to be tight, Gail thinks he would be the best at discreetly tracking down the wayward movie star before Jody and Universal Pictures find out he’s gone AWOL. 

Gosling and Blunt are breezy and charming, and the supporting cast all understand the assignment. The whole point of the now-forgotten TV series was to cut to the chase, forget about all those pesky story beats, and get to the good stunts. The Fall Guy is at its best when it’s putting its small army of crack stunt performers through their paces with the safety wires and crash bags fully visible for once. It only makes the stunts more harrowing by emphasizing the human frailty of the performers. 

The Fall Guy
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Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Geologists divide time into epochs, which can last tens of millions of years. The end of one epoch and the beginning of another is marked by clearly definable features in the geological record, such as the layer of extraterrestrial iridium laid down at the end of the Cretaceous by the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. All of human history has taken place in the Holocene epoch, but recently, the effects of climate change and industrial society have led scientists to the conclusion that we are living in a new epoch. The Anthropocene is defined as the time when human actions became more important to the state of planet Earth than natural activity. The Anthropocene’s beginning is represented by a layer of radioactive fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests which will remain visible in the soil and rocks for millions of years. 

The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in July, 1945, and the man history calls its father is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant physicist who had led a titanic effort to win a war by harnessing the very essence of the universe. Twenty years later, as the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR threatened humanity with mass extinction, Oppenheimer was interviewed on television about what it was like when his bomb went off. He said he remembered a quote from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about how a person can go from the pinnacle of scientific achievement to a hollowed-out husk of a man trying to atone for the evil he unleashed on the world. The three-hour epic, shot on IMAX film stock specially formulated for the task, is ostensibly based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Nolan owes a conceptual debt to Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning drama Copenhagen. Frayn used repetition and multiple points of view to tell the story of a fateful conversation between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his mentor Niels Bohr, who was about to flee to the United States.

Nolan takes us through Oppenheimer’s rise and fall from two different points of view: One POV, titled “Fission,” is Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) defending his life choices to a committee which would ultimately revoke his security clearances and end his career. The other POV, titled “Fusion” is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as he faces a Senate confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Fission, which covers Oppenhimer’s chaotic personal life and the development of the bomb, is in color, while Fusion, which details the anti-Communist witch hunt which destroyed him, is in black and white. 

In the color memories, Murphy embodies the quiet, enigmatic charisma described by those who followed Oppenheimer into the darkness of Los Alamos. In the creamy black and white of Fusion, he becomes the skeletal embodiment of the industrial death machine. Downey is unrecognizable as the duplicitous social climber Strauss. Matt Damon is outstanding as Gen. Leslie Groves, the back-slapping Army Corps of Engineers officer who is in way over his head overseeing the Manhattan Project. Jason Clarke gives the performance of his life as Roger Robb, the attack dog prosecutor who exposes Oppenheimer’s darkest secrets. 

Nolan’s always had problems writing female characters, so the women don’t have much to work with. Emily Blunt is all drunken hysterics as Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh puts up a good fight as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s doomed Communist mistress. 

The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientist’s queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done.  

If only the whole movie were that great. Oppenheimer is both too long and has too many cuts—a cinematic quantum paradox! At times, Nolan seems acutely aware that he’s making a movie about a bunch of weirdos writing equations on blackboards for years on end. He tries to spice things up by editing dense conversations about physics, philosophy, and politics like frenetic action sequences. In one gorgeous shot, we see Oppenheimer finally alone with The Gadget that will define a new geological epoch. It should be the tense calm before the storm, but Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame bury that gold in a blizzard of mediocre images. I found myself wishing Ludwig Göransson’s relentless, pounding score would just chill for a minute. The nonlinear structure that works so well in Copenhagen hobbles the forward momentum, and makes the complex story even more confusing.

Oppenhiemer is a return to form for Nolan after the fiasco of Tenet. There’s a great movie hiding amidst all of the formal pyrotechnics. But I guess it’s too much to ask for a lighter touch from a director who is about as subtle as an atomic bomb.

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Now Playing in Memphis: Alien Invasions

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. 

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales. 

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.  

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

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Shhhh! A Quiet Place Part II is Here

Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, and Emily Blunt battle aliens in A Quiet Place Part II.

Confession time: When I tried to watch A Quiet Place, I fell asleep. It was quiet out there — maybe too quiet. 

The premise of A Quiet Place is familiar: a family trying to survive and stick together in a depopulated, post-apocalyptic world. In this case, the cause of the depopulation turned out to be alien monsters who use only sound to perceive their environment. That means if you stay quiet, you’re safe. But as I sit here, listening to the clicks of my keyboard, it’s obvious that staying quiet is easier said than done. 

The original film was a welcome anomaly in the world of 2018: an original story sold as a spec script and produced with a reasonable budget by a mainline studio. A Quiet Place was a classic genre exploitation formula: a lot of buildup and tension-raising, followed by a (hopefully) action-packed climax, where you spend most of your budget — aka The Jaws Formula. It succeeded far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, so actor/director John Krasinski got a second bite at the apple. This time, writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck are out, and Krasinski writes, directs, and acts in the prologue, which shows how the monstrous plague began. 

One reason post-apocalyptic movies are popular is that they are relatively cheap to make. A depopulated world means fewer actors to pay, and you can dress your sets with old junk. Showing the actual apocalypse, that’s gonna cost ya. A Quiet Place Part II’s opening sequence violates all of those rules. The small-town Pennsylvania family from the first film, with Lee Abbott (director Krasinski), wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), teen daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and tween son Marcus (Noah Jupe), are attending youngest son Beau’s (Cade Woodward) little league game when mysterious flaming objects start falling from the sky. Soon, the town is overrun with hungry aliens, and the Abbotts learn the hard way that silence is the only way to stay off the menu.

Echolocating aliens want to eat you.

Animalistic space aliens looking to devour humans are one of my pet peeves. So, they have the smarts to develop interstellar spaceships, but once earthside, they suddenly lose language and become wolf-like predators? And just how did they develop a taste for human flesh, anyway? The original alien invasion, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, got this exactly right: The aliens rode around in high-tech tripods zapping people with heat rays. We were not food, we were pests to be exterminated from their new colony. But the opening scene of the last normal day hits differently after the pandemic. Indeed, A Quiet Place Part II had its world premiere on March 8, 2020. When the film skips ahead from Day 1 to Day 474, we now know how that feels. 

By Day 474, Lee and Beau are dead, and Evelyn is trying to keep her family, which now includes an infant, alive. They have one advantage: Regan is hearing impaired, and she discovered that her hearing aide produces audio feedback that causes the echolocating intruders pain. The family moves on from the burning farm where they were holed up to find other survivors. When they come across Emmett (Cillian Murphy), Lee’s best friend from the Before Time, holed up in an abandoned steel mill, things don’t go as planned. Instead of a welcome mat, Marcus finds a bear trap that almost snaps his foot off. The survivors, Emmett thinks, are “not people worth saving.” It’s up to Evelyn to prove him wrong. 

Millicent Simmonds and director John Krasinski. (photo courtesy Paramount Pictures)

Marcus’ desperate screams of pain set the sonic tone for the film: long stretches of silence pierced by sudden loud noises, which portend doom. Sound design has always been the horror director’s secret weapon, and few films have ever leaned on it harder. White noise like falling water signifies comforting defense, while the aliens’ clicks and whoops raise your resting pulse rate. The unnamed aliens’ loping gait is supplied by Krasinski himself, who was the motion capture model on set. 

Blunt was the heroine of the first film, but this outing is an ensemble piece. Simmonds, who is herself hearing impaired, moves to the forefront as Regan decides it’s up to her to find a way to fully weaponize her hearing aid against the invaders. Breaking the cardinal horror movie rule of “never split up,” she sets off alone on a cross-country trip to find the source of a mysterious radio broadcast, and is soon pursued by Emmett. By the climax, where Evelyn makes the mistake of leaving a teenage boy in charge of an infant, the film is juggling three interlocking storylines. Directed with confidence, and much more relevant than anyone could have known while they were filming, A Quiet Place Part II will keep you awake. 

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A Quiet Place

Actors Emily Blunt and John Krasinski are both expert at little looks. Their microexpressions often betray a tome’s worth of worry, regret or disdain, Krasinski’s most famously into the camera in the American version of The Office.

Their marriage has produced, besides two children, A Quiet Place, directed by Krasinski and starring the couple. It is a horror film which concerns a family in the country terrorized (as is their entire post-apocalyptic world) by blind monsters who echo-locate and horribly maul anyone who makes a loud noise.

This leads to the family and film being artfully silent. There is little dialogue, and most of it is in American Sign Language. The sound design is highly detailed, emphasizing every tiny movement and scrape as the family goes about its farm life sometimes on literal tiptoes.

John Krasinski

Creaky boards are navigated with care, everyday objects put down like ticking bombs. Every task on the the Abbott family farm is an endless font of worry for both the family and the viewer, who is kept successfully in suspense throughout every simple chore. It’s a literalization of the way in which movies use quiet to soften viewers up before a jump scare, of which there are plenty here.

As in other ambitious modern horror films, like The Babadook and It Follows, fighting the monsters also doubles as a need to heal, in this case guilt and anger over the loss of a previous family member who made a sound. The Abbotts’ daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) feels she is left out, not only because of her negligence in the previous death and her youth, but because she is deaf.

The film’s carefully constructed ambient sound drops out for her scenes, muting them. It’s a nice touch, and one that highlights not only her perspective but mirrors the estrangement nonfictional deaf people feel when they are similarly mistreated, in non-post-apocalyptic situations.

The healing, when it comes, is a little too neat, and eventually the movie is less about metaphorical fears of letting go and more about the logistics of running and hiding from giant monsters. The monsters themselves look like a slightly more tasteful version of Resident Evil Lickers (the film also shares a composer and a final image with the 2002 film), and suffer a little for being familiarly CGI mutants. But they are scary, by simple dint of appearing from nowhere and killing any noisemaker, and work as a serious threat. No explanation is given for their presence, and none needed, as it would just get in the way. An old newspaper hints at humanity’s finding out how they work: “It’s Sound!” screams The New York Post.

Krasinski does good directorial work, and gives Blunt, whose character is pregnant, many opportunities to panic, cry, and stoically work up the resolve to deal with nearby monsters, sounds and children. The family again and again must take great pains to repress themselves, and the work of self-repression builds and builds, until it becomes an unnavigable burden. Their movements cry out.

Emily Blunt

Blunt’s great, almost as excellent at registering horror and shock with thoughtful composure as she was in the scarier cartel drama Sicario. Krasinski’s bearded dad wears a look of exasperation, continually pulled in different directions by the exigencies of monster prevention and the emotional needs of family members. (As with many onscreen dads, proper care of the family unit is a spiritual calling and almost an impossible task: if we did not know he was also the director, his cross would seem just a bit too burdensome.) When the two finally have spoken, whispered dialogue, it feels unusual and focuses entirely on their unresolved emotions.

Horror films are really tragedies. When they’re not concerned with gore or sex they’re about tension, the fear and buildup to the horrible outcome, be it murder or worse. They’re an openly acceptable way for a light entertainment to discuss feelings of despair and helplessness.

They focus on the inevitable lead up to ruin, and the faces of people who see it coming, paralyzed in its sway. Their doom is often unavoidable, their hard work rewarded with bright fake blood and the loss of worry forever. But the discussion of their fate, although it’s fictional and with less critical or popular respect than other art, is enormously cathartic to anyone who feels that doom, in any way, in their day-to-day.

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The Girl On The Train

I was standing in the checkout line at Kroger when I saw the perfect tabloid headline: ANGELINA: TOO SKINNY TO CONCEIVE?

As a wordsmith, I appreciate its beauty in the same way a metalsmith might appreciate a katana. It is perfectly designed for its cruel purpose. Let’s break it down. “ANGELINA” defines the audience — women to whom Angelina Jolie is already a character in their minds, a beautiful, privileged woman with a complex personal life who is in every way more interesting and perfect than you. Then the colon delivers the warhead: “TOO SKINNY TO CONCEIVE?” Angelina Jolie is skinny. I wish I was as skinny as she is. But it’s bad that she is so skinny, because she can’t have a baby, which is the end-all, be-all of feminine existence. I have a baby, therefore I’m better than Angelina Jolie. But having the baby made me fat, and Angelina Jolie is so skinny, she has Brad Pitt. Or had, anyway. The beauty of the headline is that it allows women to feel both superior and inferior at the same time toward a famous woman, and then feel guilty about it. It’s a self-destructive psychodrama in five words, weaponized to make women pick up a trashy tabloid and read a complete nothingburger of a story.

I feel the same kind of grudging admiration toward that headline as I do toward The Girl on the Train. The film is adapted from the 2015 bestseller by Paula Hawkins, which was hawked as “The Next Gone Girl.” I didn’t read the book, but the film adaptation, directed by The Help‘s Tate Taylor with the screenplay adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson of Secretary, seems like it took “The Next Gone Girl” not as a description, but as marching orders. It’s a button-pushing, potboiler thriller, the same material that formed Alfred Hitchcock’s career. A female friend said it was “A Lifetime movie times 100, but I liked it. It’s a girl thing.”

Emily Blunt goes off the rails as Rachel in The Girl on the Train.

Structurally, at least, The Girl on the Train is a lot more sophisticated than Mother, May I Sleep with Danger. (“No! You can’t sleep with danger! It’s literally called DANGER! Why are we even having this conversation?”) Taylor and Wilson take a fair stab at adapting Hawkins’ literary conceit of three narrators. There’s Rachel (Emily Blunt), the literal girl on the train, whom we meet in the midst of her commute to New York City. Despite the trappings of a successful professional life, she’s hopelessly depressed, living mostly through the fantasies she cooks up about the prosperous people she sees in the cookie-cutter houses along the train’s route. Then there’s Megan (Haley Bennett), the blonde bombshell who inspires Rachel’s envy with her perfect house, handsome husband, and seeming life of leisure. But our third narrator, Anna, has the one trapping of success that the other two lack: a baby. The only thing wrong in her idyllic Anthropologie catalog life is that her handsome, high-earning, baby-making husband Tom (Justin Theroux) has a crazy, drunk ex-wife, whom, we find out, just happens to be Rachel.

None of these three women are reliable narrators or very nice people, but the not-so-functioning alcoholic Rachel is the least reliable of all, because she spends most of her nights blackout blitzed. When she wakes up bloodied and half-clothed one morning and finds weird voicemails on her phone from Tom, she has no answers for Police Detective Riley (Allison Janney), who comes around asking why Megan has gone missing.

The Girl on the Train hops around both in time and point of view to slowly dole out plot points at the most disorienting moments, and usually I’m on board with that, but in this case, all the structural trickery just serves to highlight the characters’ cynical shallowness. Rachel, Megan, and Anna are like Angelina Jolie in the headline: blank hooks where target audiences hang their anxieties about wealth, status, body image, and fertility. Calling a film “manipulative” is not necessarily an insult (see: Hitchcock), but when the manipulation is as openly cynical as The Girl on the Train, it spoils the fun.