‘The Girl on a Train’ tells a fairly straightforward story

“The Help’s” Tate Taylor adapts Paul Hawkins’ No. 1 best-seller about an alcoholic divorcee (Emily Blunt) whose daily commute makes her privy to a startling mystery involving what she thinks is a flawless couple.

The book took place in London, but the movie is set in the NY suburb of Ardsley-on-Hudson, one of those Peyton Places where misery lurks behind the manicured greenery. And not just my character in this film, but also what Rachel was going through, as well.

Rachel, who watches both couples each day as she rides the commuter line to and from the city where she no longer has a job, imagines the Hipwells are ideally in love.

Blunt plays Rachel Watson, an alcoholic who often can’t remember her actions once she’s sober.

Producer Marc Platt said he knew the “tantalizing, sexually charged mystery” would be ideal to adapt for film.

As Taylor (“The Help”, “Get On Up“) found out when he finally sat down to read Paula Hawkins’s novel, it does have many familiar elements of a “whodunit” tale – yet it’s complemented by troubled characters that are deeper than those in your average thriller.

This change in the location of the mystery thriller has left many fans in anticipation for the film’s release.

Since the book upon which the movie is based was a best seller, The Girl on the Train is likely to generate some serious revenue at the box office when it opens.

The latter successfully crafted Gone Girl into a tense and darkly amusing commentary on modern marriage and post-recession middle-class malaise, aided by a career best Ben Affleck and startling performance from Rosamund Pike.

The moment Emily Blunt first appeared in The Devil Wears Prada I knew – like many – that she was going to be a star.

Taylor’s decision to glam it up the point of camp works for me.

“It was a bit of a departure for me, which is always appealing”. “Growing up, I really didn’t like pink!” Her other noted films include “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”, “Looper” and “Sicario”. She becomes obsessed with her ex’s new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and with Anna’s neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett), whose life – through a train window – looks ideal. Instead, it’s closer to the kind of early ’90s psychological thriller where bad things happen in slow motion and deadly instruments are drawn from kitchen drawers.

And immediately, I was like, this is a great set-up for a film. Also, as one would expect, Emily Blunt is brilliant in the role, seemingly drawing inspiration from a lot of the personality traits of her Sicario character (obsession and becoming completely consumed by a mystery) and applying it to a deadly alcoholic fighting for a goal to live for. “We’re so used to having these men running photography, but there she was creating incredible images that I don’t want to say are Scandinavian, but I think there’s a nod to our pictures, which I felt proud to be a part of. I equate women with being survivors because of my mom”, he said. Blunt makes her pain palpable, her face puffy and her disorientation real.

Blunt has made a habit (if not a career) of shining in roles that rarely seem written as showcases – recall Edge of Tomorrow, that Tom Cruise vehicle Blunt jumped behind the wheel of and made her own. What is this woman projecting onto these two that she lacks in her own life, you might wonder, and what state of mind has inspired this fixation?