The Girl on the Bus

I’m a huge Emmy Blunt fan. She’s gorgeous, talented, and that West London accent does funny things to me. I even stood outside in the rain last year during the Sicario premiere just to get a glimpse of her, which resulted in me having a cold for a week just as I was beginning my thesis, so that was a bit foolish. (To add to the nonsensicalness of that exercise, I still haven’t gotten round to seeing Sicario . It’s just not my genre).

Anyway, I was really excited by The Girl on the Train trailer when I first saw it. The content looked extremely intriguing and dark, invariably evoking memories of Gone Girl. After all, both are big-screen adaptations of best-selling thrillers with a beautiful British actress playing the lead, unreliable narrators and the word ‘Girl’ in the title.

Furthermore, the employment of a remix of Kanye West’s Heartless was dope; it rivalled War Dogs’ using a cover of No Church in the Wild in terms of ‘using a Kanye song to entice the audience’ stakes (although the best use of Kanye West in a film trailer is still, IMO, Power in The Social Network trailer. The conflation of the lyrics [‘No one man should have all that power’] and the plot of that film, especially Jesse Eisenberg’s superb performance as a hubristic megalomaniac, is just so astute).

However, my interest in The Girl on the Train dwindled slightly when I saw it only got rated 15. I was hoping it was going to be the second 2016 film that I’d seen that was 18-rated, the other being the rather unremarkable The Neon Demon. I saw 5 2015 releases that were an 18 (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Hateful Eight, Legend, Knock Knock), so I’d really be hoping to match that amount of 18s watched this year. But nah, The Girl on the Train is only a 15.

Not only that, it got a 15A in Ireland, who unlike the BBFC, have the 16 rating that they slap on movies that sit in that awkward 15/18 hinterland. But the fact that the Irish film board didn’t even need to get a 16 out tells me it’s not even gonna be a hard 15!

Boring.

So there goes my hopes of this film being 2016’s Gone Girl.

How could they be so heartless?