Directed by David Fincher. Starring: Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Missi Pyle, Casey Wilson, Emily Ratajkowski.
Cert 18, 145 mins. By Robbie Collins.
Can someone vanish if, in the first place, they were never truly there? A missing-person thriller might not seem like a likely forum for this kind of metaphysical grappling, but David Fincher, the director of The Social Network, Fight Club and Zodiac, is not a filmmaker prone to swaddling his audience in the consolations of the likely.
Fincher’s 10th film, Gone Girl, is based closely on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling 2012 novel which used a page-turning plot line – the sudden disappearance of a smart, pretty, married woman called Amy Elliott-Dunne (Rosamund Pike) – to unpick the modern mania for presenting a perfected version of ourselves to others, even as the truth roils and bubbles underneath.
In Fincher’s hands, that smart but arguably undisciplined story becomes something even wilder and yet perversely also more controlled – a neo-noir thriller turned on its blood-spattered head. Here, it’s the homme, rather than the femme, who has the fatale aura, and what comes out of the past only serves to further cloud the murky present.
These scenes are stern and crisp, underscored not with music, but the dust-dry buzz of air-conditioning and fluorescent light. We hear it when Nick comes home to find the living room furniture turned upside down and his wife of five years nowhere to be seen – and again when he’s taken in for questioning by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), who wonders if there’s more to this man than meets her already sceptical eye.
Gone Girl review – two different
readings of a modern marriage
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The last time David Fincher took a stab at a bestselling potboiler with an enigmatic femme fatale, the disappointing result was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an eye-catchingly stylish but thematically empty (and, frankly, unnecessary) English-language remake of an entirely serviceable Danish/Swedish hit. Now, with this grippingly caustic adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bifurcated novel (which the author has brilliantly adapted and reconfigured for the screen), Fincher is back on form, mixing the forensic procedure of Zodiac with the playful high-gloss sheen of The Game to ingeniously wrong-foot the audience, leading them on a merry dance of death through the murderous maze of modern marriage.
Shooting in handsome 6K digital widescreen, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth keeps the visual tone cool and detached even as events heat up, eschewing the tics and flashes of yore. This is a picture-perfect world, presented with the untouched clarity of a crime scene, fine-tuned and framed by Fincher, whose obsessive attention to detail mirrors that of his titular muse. At 149 minutes, the film never drags nor does its mood settle, slipping from classy narcissistic humour to exploitation-inflected thrills in an instant; mercurial, mystifying – and tantalisingly missing.
These modes all trade in stereotypical views of the essences of masculinity and femininity. All are politically incorrect by definition. All seem to have had at least some bearing on "Gone Girl." The movie is sick joke, a fable and a lament. It's "He done her wrong" and "She done him wrong." It's "Men are spineless pigs" and "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." If you make blanket assumptions about what men and women are capable of, and the circumstances under with they're capable of it, this film will confirm them. "Your chin," Amy tells Nick in a flashback, "it's quite villainous." He covers it up with his finger, but now that she's pointed it out, you can't not stare at it.
The most intriguing thing about "Gone Girl" is how droll it is. For long stretches, Fincher's gliding widescreen camerawork, immaculate compositions and sickly, desaturated colors fuse with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's creepy-optimistic synthesized score to create a perverse big-screen version of one of those TV comedies built around a pathetically unobservant lump of a husband and his hypercontrolling, slightly shrewish wife. For most of its running time, "Gone Girl" is "Everybody Loves Accused Wife-Murderer Raymond," sprinkled with colorful-verging-on-wacky supporting players (including Tyler Perry as a Johnnie Cochran-like defense attorney and Neil Patrick Harris as a former flame of Amy's who's still obsessed with her). Then it takes a right turn, and a left turn, and flips upside down.
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