FAQ

Every day, divorcee Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) takes the train into Manhattan and passes the house where ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) now lives with his new wife Anna Boyd (Rebecca Ferguson) and their infant daughter Evie. To distract herself, Rachel begins to focus on another couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans) Hipwell, who live a few houses down and who seem to have the perfect marriage...until one day Megan goes missing, and it looks like Rachel, during an alcoholic blackout, may have had something to do with it. If only she could remember.

The Girl on the Train is a 2015 novel by British author Paula Hawkins. The novel was adapted for the movie by American screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson.

Answer 1 - The film is structured similar to how the book is written, bouncing back and forth in time from Rachel's story to Megan's story and to Anna's story. Because of this, viewers complain that the movie is hard to follow until the very end. Some even have had to see it twice before figuring it out. The book gives more background on the major characters and their relation to the plot, so reading the book first and familiarizing yourself with the background stories might be the better way to go. Answer 2 - Anyone who has ever watched a film based on a book after first reading the book, will nearly always come out with the notion that the film was "not as good as the book!" (primarily because of changes & inevitable omissions that come with turning a book into a film). Whereas, watching a film first and then reading the book does not seem to have that same damaging effect on the experience of reading a book (primarily because in that case the book actually adds to the story rather than omit). So there are pros and cons to either way of going about it.