Rachel (Emily Blunt), a hopeless alcoholic, gets on the train to go to work everyday, watching the same house as it flies by. It's looks like the home of a perfect couple--but what Rachel doesn’t know is Megan (Hayley Bennett), the beautiful blonde who looks out everyday from the deck, suffers from her own demons as well as a suffocating marriage. She also happens to be the housekeeper for Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), who lives down the street, and whom Rachel’s ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) cheated on her with, and is now married to. Only when Megan goes missing does Rachel find herself plunging into a web of deceit, mystery, infidelity, and self-doubt. Because as she tries to solve who could have kidnapped Megan, she must also question herself.

Adapted from the book by Paula Hawkins, director Tate Taylor reimagines the sensational thriller for the screen. It’s still from the eyes of three women, across time, across memory, where rainy blues, whites, and silvers dominate the color palette. Here, form follows function, as Megan’s blackouts and drunken haze make the film unsteady and dark. The film pores into the “perfect” lives of three women in and out of marriage.

We learn early on that Rachel is a suffering alcoholic; and like the cinematographer describes, we’re constantly in her face, which is wavering and unsure. As the title suggests, the film is like a train passing by houses, a collage of images one after the other. Blunt is exceedingly convincing drunk and inebriated, portraying a drunk woman in a way neither silly nor exaggerated. Her confusion and horror is felt during the film, as she strains to remember what happened during her blackouts. When she wakes one morning with dried blood on her shoulder, she is forced to confront her greatest fear--that she might have killed Megan. She doesn’t know. In Rachel’s own words, she’s afraid of herself.

The film is a psychological thriller, and when the tables turn, it’s truly clever, smart, unexpected, surprising, without stretching sense. It takes the viewer in an intricate tour of the complexities the marriage, the shadows and room for doubt. It’s also about the facade we put on for our neighbors: the image these women see of each other, polished or perfect or carefree or paradisal, changes over the course of the film drastically. Above all, it’s a great movie about three women, tapping into the rarely recognized potential of women in horror, crime, and mystery. Each of their demons are real and complex, and thus their characters--and because they are such different women, they react differently when their lives intersect uncontrollably. The three men of the film, Luke Evans, the hulky “perfect” husband, Justin Theroux, the “nice guy” cheater, Edgar Ramirez, the thinker therapist, are roundly created as well. There’s a point in the film when you question every person, when their card has flipped from good to bad and back again. Everything comes back to the girl on the train.