“The Girl on the Train” directed by Tate Taylor opened in theaters on Thursday, Oct. 6. Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins, the film has received mixed and rather harsh reviews from critics and viewers alike.

However, I thought that the film was particularly entertaining with a twist I never saw coming.   

The film is set around three main characters, Rachel (Emily Blunt), Megan (Harley Bennett) and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). After Rachel divorces her husband, she loses her job in the city due to alcoholism, but she continues riding the train into the city each day in order to pass her old house where her husband now lives with his mistress and their daughter.

One day, Rachel sees an unfamiliar face that causes her to get off the train.  However, she sees more than she planned on and becomes caught up in a missing persons investigation as a prime suspect.

There is only one problem:  she was too drunk to remember anything she did that night.

The film was well-paced and the crescendo to the climax, in the form of a serious unsuspected twist, was very satisfying. I was never bored with the mystery taking place before my eyes.

The film is reliant on voiceover work, which can either help or cripple a film’s strength. In this case, I believe that it was helpful but not as effective as it was in films such as “Seven Psychopaths” (2012) or “Trainspotting” (1996). While the film was entertaining, it lacked an element to set it apart. 

Take the film “Psycho” (1960), for instance; that film is iconic, because it pushed boundaries and tested norms of cinema by killing the main character in the first half of the film. While this is not a new approach in

today’s cinema, it was shocking at the time and earned Hitchcock’s film immortality.

“The Girl on a Train” will be lumped together in the same ball park as “Gone Girl” (2014) and “Side Effects” (2013). This connection illustrates that the film failed to distance itself in some way by pushing the boundaries of film.

The film is truly a good one, as it is entertaining and definitely worth a watch. The score is subtle yet solid. Camera work is fairly vanilla with a few exceptions, but it surely does its job, and the film told a very entertaining story with a great twist that I never saw coming. In conclusion, I give “The Girl on the Train” seven out of 10 stars for its genre.