Paula Hawkins’s bestseller The Girl on the Train yielded an unsuccessful Hollywood adaptation in 2016. The tale of a missing woman that has three unreliable narrators, red herrings and a central theme whose unravelling provides the solution to the mystery, the novel poses immense adaptation challenges.
The American production struggled to extract a filmable plot out of an eventful but deeply interior narrative. Ribhu Dasgupta’s Hindi remake, which is out on Netflix, takes the easy way out: it completely sidesteps the source material’s principal ideas.
Rather than a psychological drama about a woman who is lost and finds herself again through sheer willpower, Dasgupta’s The Girl on the Train stumbles about thriller territory. Parineeti Chopra plays Mira, a divorcee in London. Her law practice has been wrecked by her drinking habit. She is still stuck on her ex-husband Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary. Deeply resentful of his second marriage, Mira drinks furiously and…