The Girl On The Train

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN is the story of a troubled alcoholic who gets involved in the murder of a girl whom she hardly knows. Mira Kapoor (Parineeti Chopra), based in London, is happily married to Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary). Mira takes up the case of an African man who gets killed in a shootout. She then receives threats from the family of the accused, Jimmy Baga.

When The Girl on the Train, a psychological thriller novel by British author Paula Hawkins first came out in 2015, readers lapped it up like it was manna from heaven. She was hailed as the new voice in British crime writing. Her book, which was mostly about an alcoholic woman struggling to come to grips with reality, felt like a realistic piece about real world problems. The murder mystery portions felt secondary.

"Facebook and ex-wives do not make good friends," says Mira Kapoor's (Parineeti Chopra) friend in Netflix's latest release, The Girl On The Train. If you feel like you have already heard this somewhere, you're right. Rachel's (Emily Blunt) roommate had the same dialogue in the 2016 Hollywood film which was based on Paula Hawkin's best-selling novel. But the Parineeti Chopra-starrer is nothing like the 2016 blockbuster that won several accolades.

Set in the UK, we see Nusrat (Aditi Rao Hydari) running in a forest from someone, as the scene cuts to an injured Mira Kapoor (Parineeti Chopra) waiting for her train to arrive. Through flashback, we understand Mira is a lawyer married to Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary). Some goons threaten her to withdraw a case we know nothing about.

An alcoholic with a memory fractured by amnesia, Mira Kapoor (Parineeti Chopra) takes an aimless train ride through London each day. Through her window she sees a young woman (Aditi Rao Hydari) with a man at a house close to the tracks. After repeated sightings, Mira becomes fixated on this pretty stranger's apparent happiness and abnormally involved in the couple's relationship.

Paula Hawkins's bestseller The Girl on the Train yielded an unsuccessful Hollywood adaptation in 2016. The tale of a missing woman that has three unreliable narrators, red herrings and a central theme whose unravelling provides the solution to the mystery, the novel poses immense adaptation challenges.

Although I cracked its suspense 100 pages too soon, I enjoyed how much fun author Paula Hawkins has around The Girl on the Train's unreliable narrator. Its entire premise revolving around three women and their interconnected lives, building on intrigue and melodrama, is tailor-made for a movie. Yet neither Emily Blunt's 2015 adaptation nor this new one starring Parineeti Chopra make the cut.

A psychological thriller with too many arbitrary twists for its own good, The Girl On The Train, a Netflix presentation, runs out of steam pretty quickly and degenerates into a bumpy ride. The film, written and directed by Ribhu Dasgupta, deviates sharply, and frequently, from the source material - British author Paula Hawkins' bestseller of the same title that yielded an Emily Blunt-fronted Hollywood movie in 2016 - and loses its way in a maze of cliches.

With Teen, Ribhu Dasgupta proved that he could handle thrillers well and The Girl on the Train establishes his command over churning exciting moments out of the mundane. Since his debut feature Michael, he likes to turn a suspense story into a thriller somewhere in the latter part of the second half, and with this one, he has tried to prolong the duration of the shock. It has worked too but at the cost of his style which was more internal and personal in Teen.

Once feisty lawyer Mira Kapoor (Parineeti Chopra) is spiralling under the trauma of losing her child, a husband she had loved and a career that was blossoming... one high-risk case at a time. Well, it doesn't help either that an unfortunate car accident leaves her with a rare form of amnesia and she eventually turns into a massive alcoholic.