A woman is missing. In a room, a detective quizzes two people. Each offers a different account of events. The sound of a car pulling up outside indicates the arrival of a third person, who was also present on the night in question. A detail about the car is relevant to both accounts. What does the detective do? He stands like a lollipop while one of the two goes out to meet the third at the car. Even Dougal from Father Ted would recognise that, police procedurally-speaking, this is a no, no, no.
Plotting like this, as unconvincing as it is obvious, is the hallmark of this new adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s bestselling novel. Tension-free action trundles along at a milk-train pace, in spite of the fact that adapters Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel have trimmed the multiple viewpoints of the book from three to one.
Cipher-thin characters, under Joe Murphy’s turgid direction, offer the actors little opportunity to develop credible motivations or reactions. Jill Halfpenny is punchily robust as Rachel, the thirtysomething “girl” of the title, whose alcohol-impaired memory has even more holes than the plot and whose imaginary connection with lives viewed from a train window, in becoming real, helps her to uncover buried truths in her own life. Visually, while Lily Arnold’s over-rigid, single-set design constrains the multi-location action, Andrzej Goulding’s video designs of passing trains pleasingly project pace through space.
