The Girl on the Train Review

The Girl on the Train describes the story of a young woman Mira Kapoor. She travels on the train daily because she has no partner, and her life is boring. She has a fantasy of looking into the houses that comes on the way of her journey. She looks at the houses and the people living inside them. She judges them as happy, sad, stressed, etc. The story takes a twist when she comes to know that a dead body is found in the jungle and belongs to one of the persons she saw while traveling on the train. Let us see what will happen in the story, what happened to that person.

Introduction of the Movie

"The Girl on the Train" is a suspense-based Bollywood thriller movie. It was released in 2021 on 26 February on the OTT platform Netflix. Netflix is famous worldwide for its fantastic web series and movies. Ribhu Dasgupta directs the movie. It is produced by Reliance Entertainment (Vivek B Agrawal). This movie is inspired by an English novel named "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins. This novel was published in 2015. A Hollywood movie is also filmed in this novel. Vidhesh Malandkar, Ribhu Dasgupta, and Erin Cressida Wilson give the movie's screenplay. Cinematography is given by Tribhuvan Babu Sadineni and edited by Sangeeth Varghese. It has a running time of two hours. The story revolves around a girl named Mira who travels on a train daily. She was blamed for the murder of another girl whom she saw on the train coach.

Cast

• Parineeti Chopra played the role of Mira Kapoor
• Aditi Rao Hydari played the role of Nusrat John Joshi
• Kirti Kulhari played the role of Inspector Dalbir Kaur Bagga
• Avinash Tiwary played the role of Dr. Shekhar Kapoor, Mira's ex-husband
• Tota Roy Chowdhury played the role of Dr. Hamid, the psychiatrist
• Suresh Sippy (Mira's Doctor)
• Nisha Aaliya played the role of Piya, Mira's friend
• Sharik Khan played the role of Wasim, Piya's friend
• Diljohn Singh played the role of Rajiv
• Shamaun Ahmed played the role of Anand Joshi, Nusrat's husband
• Monisha Hassen played the role of Zehra, Shekhar's boss
• Vaunisha Kapoor played the role of the Party Guest
• Nina Kumar played the role of Zehra's friend
• Krishan Tandon played the role of Jimmy Bagga, Dalbir's father
• Persephone Hulewicz played the role of Pri
• Vishakh Vadgama played the role of Officer Kunal
• Natasha Benton played the role of Anjali Kapoor, Shekhar's second wife
• Richie Lawrie played the role of Walter

Story of the Movie

The movie starts with Mira Kapoor, a criminal lawyer living a comfortable life with her husband, Shekhar. One day she got a warning from an unknown person regarding not taking up a case. Shekhar also insists on Mira not fighting this case. This case is based on the murder of a pub employee whose charge is on the pub's owner, Jimmy Bagga. Mira wins the case, and Jimmy is punished with life imprisonment. After six months, they had a car accident in which Mira lost her memory capability to remember things for a more extended period. She gets addicted to alcohol and behaves violently.

She does not remember anything after coming out of the intoxication. She disrespects Shekhar's boss at a party. As a reason, Shekhar is fired from the job. Due to the weird activities of Mira, Shekhar leaves her and marries another girl named Anjali. She travels the same train route daily, looking at her old house where a girl named Nusrat now works as a nurse in a city hospital. Mira thinks Nusrat is living a peaceful life with her husband, Anand Joshi. She is obsessed with her. But she is not living a peaceful life because her husband Anand feels Nusrat has an external affair with someone. Mira finds out that Nusrat has an affair with someone. In anger, she thinks of killing her, but a video of her activity accidentally says she would kill Nusrat. The next day Mira visited her house and observed Nusrat going into the forest. She follows her; in the process, someone clicks Mira's photo.

In the next scene, Mira is found injured and standing at a railway station. She does not recall anything when she comes out of unconsciousness. She receives a message from an unknown contact that someone has seen her in the forest. After two days, Officer Kunal receives a call from the city hospital that a nurse named Nusrat has been missing for two days. A friend of Nusrat tells Officer Kunal about the last attended party of Nusrat. Kunal and Officer Kaur visit the party organizer Rajeev. Dr. Hamid tells them that someone was blackmailing Nusrat and Rajeev is not her boyfriend. Then Officer Kaur meets Anand; he tells her that the couple has filed a divorce request, so Anand did not file any complaint regarding her missing. Kunal got some video clips in which Rajeev can be seen forcefully taking Nusrat into the basement.

After investigation, Kaur and Kunal learned that this Girl was not Nusrat. That Girl was Komal, a YouTuber who visited Rajeev for a video recording, but Rajeev misbehaved with her, leading to a fight between Rajeev and Komal's boyfriends. Both officers find several pieces of evidence against Mira. She meets Anand at a party, where Anand shows her the photograph of Dr. Hamid. Anand hired a private detective named Walter for Nusrat. Walter calls Mira and tells her he has seen her in the forest. He demands the money from Mira, and she agrees. Mira drops her phone while running from Officer Kaur. Officer Kaur comes to know about Walter from Mira's phone. Mira enquires about her train time two hours earlier than the time shown by Kaur. Mira meets Shekhar's boss, who tells her that she did not misbehave with her. Mira checks Nusrat's phone and learns that Nusrat and Shekhar had an affair. Mira checks Walter's house, where all pieces of evidence are available. Shekhar reaches there and tells her about his affair. He also tells her that it was his mistake that Nusrat fell unconscious. Kaur reaches there and tells Mira that she had killed Nusrat because Nusrat had seen her attempting to murder Mira. Kaur lost her life in a fight with Mira. The police arrest Shekhar, and the story ends here.

Review

Story, dialogues, casting, acting, music. These are the most critical factors significantly responsible for deciding the film's fate. They decide whether the film will hit or flop. Let us talk about their role in brief.

1. Music: In a two-hour runtime, the film's makers added four songs that could be more optimal. Having fewer songs in the film makes it exciting and enjoyable to watch. But, if the number of songs is more, it will decrease the audience's interest in the film. This movie contains four songs. They are:
   
   • Chhal gaya Challa
   • Matlabi Yaarian
   • Mahi Mera Ranjha
   • Matlabi Yaarian -unplugged
2. Director: The lead character of the movie is shown overdrunk. Excess makeup to highlight wounds creates a weird image in the audience's mind. The director had not made enough effort to make the film natural. To make the film crispier, the director changed the novel's original story and created a different ending.
3. 3. Acting: We can observe more overacting than acting in the film. Everything is tried to be displayed exaggeratedly.
4. Casting: Selecting characters for their respective roles in the movie could be better. Mira's character does not fit in Parineeti Chopra's acting. Neither her acting nor her expressions match the scene of the film. There is a lack of reality in the movie due to the absence of emotions and feelings among the characters.
5. Uniformity: The movie's run time is not uniformly distributed. Some scenes are too extended, whereas some are completed quickly.

Conclusion

"The Girl on the Train" is a suspense thriller released on Netflix, an OTT platform. This movie is a copy of a Hollywood movie. The movie depicts the story of a girl who faces several life problems. The story consists of many love affairs in married life that lead to weaker relationship bonds. The movie starts as a cause of revenge from a lawyer who fights a case and wins. In the rage of revenge, a daughter tries to punish an innocent. According to the audience, the Hollywood version of the novel is better than the Bollywood one. "The Girl on the Train" received an IMDb rating of 4 out of 10.