This article contains major spoilers for The Girl on the Train (2021) ending.
The Hindi remake of The Girl on the Train is terrible garbage. But, while it mimics the structure and many of the twists of both the source material and the 2016 Hollywood adaptation, it builds to an all-new turn built atop an all-new subplot, so it’s worthy of some examination if only to see quite how badly it went wrong.
The Emily Blunt stand-in here is Parineeti Chopra’s Mira, a lawyer who we see before her downward spiral into obsession and alcoholism. She’s happily shacked up with Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary), but her life is thrown into disarray when, immediately following the successful conviction of a criminal bigwig, Bagga, who she was threatened in relation to, she has a car crash, loses her baby, and leaves Shekhar after he has an affair. The next we see her she’s an alcoholic who takes the same train every day so her friend doesn’t realize she isn’t working. On that train, she spies on a couple, Nusrat (Aditi Rao Hydari) and Anand (Shamaun Ahmed), who she deems to have a perfectly contented life.
That is, at least, until Mira sees Nusrat with another man, and jumps off the train to intervene, to prevent her from ruining her “perfect” life. When she comes to she’s covered in blood and has become the chief suspect in the investigations of Inspector Kaur, who is looking into the disappearance and eventually death of Nusrat, which Mira has to sober up a bit in order to investigate herself.
So far, so familiar. And it continues along those lines in its revelations. In a series of non-linear sequences, we learn that Nusrat was pregnant and that neither her husband nor the man Mira saw her with is the father. Mira runs into Shekhar’s former boss, who reveals that he was fired not because Mira embarrassed him, as he made her believe, but because he was carrying on an affair with a female member of staff – Nusrat, as it turns out. This leads Mira along a path of several revelations in montages set to ill-chosen songs, during which she realizes that Shekhar gaslit and abused her, using her alcoholism as a cover, and he continued to do so even on the night that Nusrat died.
See, that night, Mira followed Nusrat on her way to meeting with Shekhar to tell him that he was the father of her child. When she presented herself, Shekhar badly beat her, and then strangled Nusrat in an argument, presumably to death. This is all revealed to Mira when she confronts him about what she has learned and remembered. It also quite closely mirrors the original plot.
But it’s here that this new version of The Girl on the Train starts to distinguish itself, and it all ties back into the early scenes we saw of Mira getting Bagga convicted. During the course of her investigation, she discovers that Nusrat’s husband, Anand, hired a private investigator named Walter when he suspected her of having an affair. Walter was present for what took place in the woods and had lots more documented evidence besides. When Walter is killed in a hit-and-run, Mira finds her way to his stash of photos and such, which enable her to put the final pieces together. The driver of the car that killed Walter was Inspector Kaur, who is Bagga’s daughter. She believed her father was innocent and has followed and obsessed over Mira since seeing her at the train station. When she followed her into the woods and discovered that Nusrat was still alive after being strangled by Shekhar, she hit on the idea of framing Mira for Nusrat’s death. So, she pursued Nusrat through the woods and beat her to death, and has since then been trying to implicate Mira once and for all. But a newly-sober Mira is too smart for that (or so we’re to believe – it’s a tough sell) and reveals that she led Kaur here herself. They fight, and Mira ends up shooting the woman dead, framing Shekhar for the murder. I’d say he deserved it.
