4 Reasons to Read The Girl on the Train Before You See the Movie

The book follows Rachel, an unemployed, divorced alcoholic, who takes the train along her former work commute route every day in an attempt to hide the fact that she lost her job. During her rides, she drinks and fantasizes about the lives of a couple whose house she passes. She’s named them Jason and Jess and sees them as an idyllic pair living a charmed life, just a few doors down from the home Rachel used to share with her husband, who now lives there with his new wife. One day, Rachel sees—or thinks she sees—something from the passing train that will explode the lives of both couples…as well as her own.
Here are four compelling reasons you should definitely make time to read the book before you buy your tickets.
You’re the casting director. And the set designer, the director of photography, location manager, and even the head of craft services (if you like to snack while you read). Sure, we all know Blunt has been cast in the lead role. But one of the beautiful things about reading the book first is that you don’t automatically insert images of Blunt as Rachel—or any of the rest of the cast—in your head as you read. Your imagination teams with Hawkins’s words to create the mysterious people, shadowy places, and shady situations in this spellbinding story.
You can make the pleasure of the story last even longer. A movie is only a couple of hours, but the book is deliciously so much more. Even if you’re a super-fast reader, you can stretch out these 336 pages over a few commutes of your own. And all that extra time benefits the storytelling greatly—heightening the monotony of Rachel’s typical day-to-day life, the powerlessness she feels in her addiction to alcohol, and the black hole of Rachel’s memory surrounding one tragic night.
There’s more to the story. There’s only so much detail that can be packed into a film. Plus, the novel employs trickery with its unreliable narrators, alternating points of view, and careful doling out of information via methods that only work word-by-word and page-by-page. The movie will naturally have its own modes of deception to keep viewers guessing, but it’s valuable to get the story the way the author intended it first, and then check out the film for the sake of comparison, as it can often differ greatly.
You get to be that person who walks away from the movie proclaiming, “The book was better.” Or maybe you’ll be that person that says, “Wow, the movie really did justice to the book,” or, “Was that movie really based on this same book?” Regardless of your take on the film, you’ll be on solid ground to compare the two. And when someone at the office says, “What did you think about that character they added/totally left out/completely changed?,” you’ll know exactly what to say.