Gillian Flynn’s international bestseller Gone Girl was not exactly high art but it was riotously entertaining; a pulpy page-turner about a toxic marriage with a plot twist that hits you right between the eyes. David Fincher’s screen version of the twisted mystery is just as pulpy and just as entertaining. Rather than dousing the story in stoicism, Fincher embraces the heightened emotional tone of the book, producing a film that is deliciously sadistic and cruelly comical.
On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) heads to the bar he co-owns with his twin sister Margo for a stiff drink. It’s hardly the behaviour of a happily married man and indeed we quickly learn that Nick and Amy (Rosamund Pike) are going through some tough times. On his return home, Nick discovers broken glass and signs of a violent struggle – Amy has vanished. We follow Nick throughout the ordeal of his wife’s disappearance and the subsequent media frenzy as unpleasant truths come to light and Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect.
What begins as a film about the multiple personalities men and women adopt in their courtship of one another, morphs into a sharply observed dark comedy about the cat and mouse game played between the justice system and the media. As the besieged Nick Dunne, Affleck is pitch perfect – at first dazed by the situation in which he finds himself, then sharply defiant as he attempts to fight back. Affleck captures Nick’s uneasy mixture of charm and cruelty. The film though, belongs to Amazing Amy. I have always found Pike to be a uniquely cool screen presence, composed and elegant. Here, this coolness becomes calculation, her elegance a facade for the extremes of emotion brewing behind those open features. From page to screen, the transition is flawless.
The third inhabitant of this viper’s nest is Fincher himself. Although his fingerprints are there in the finely composed direction, he lets the material drive the action, using his camera like a microscope to scrutinise Affleck and Pike. The sly comedy of Flynn’s screenplay is allowed to flourish, resulting in a film that is stylish and sophisticated but also wickedly playful.