8 Ways The Girl On The Train Is Just A Lazy Gone Girl

Credit it where it's due, author Paula Hawkins and Taylor do try to bring a unique edge to the story, telling it from three different perspectives, a surprise given how much the marketing hinged on Emily Blunt. It's not perfect, and at points can under-serve some of the characters, especially Rebecca Ferguson's as Anna, but it's a neat enough trick.

The issues come when this device is further complicated by telling part of the story in flashback. Now, in Gone GIrl, the flashbacks all come from Amy's fake diary and exist to wrong-foot the audience and highlight our preconceptions of the story; it has a clear purpose. The Girl On The Train just throws it in to seem more complex.

We see Megan's life in the lead-up to her murder, because obviously her strand of the narrative ends pretty early, but these sequences don't really offer up much; it's mostly unrelated from the mystery that's unfolding in the present and they're randomly inserted so as to best artificially create tension, which leads to unclear boundaries.