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"Gone Girl" is art and entertainment, a thriller and an issue, and an eerily assured audience picture. It is also a film that shifts emphasis and perspective so many times that you may feel as though you're watching five short movies strung together, each morphing into the next.

At first, "Gone Girl" seems to tell the story of a man who might or might not have killed somebody, and is so closed off and alienating (like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, perhaps) that even people who believe in his innocence can't help wondering. His name is Nick Dunne ( Ben Affleck ). He's a college professor and a blocked writer. His dissatisfied wife Amy ( Rosamund Pike ) disappears one day, prompting local cops to open a missing persons case that becomes a murder investigation after three days pass without word from her. Amy and Nick seemed like a happy couple. The snippets from Amy's diary, read in voice-over by Amy and accompanied by flashbacks, hint at differences between them, but not the sort that seem irreconcilable (not at first, anyway). Were things ever really all that sunny, though? If they weren't, which spouse was the main source of rancor? Can we trust what Nick tells the homicide detectives ( Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit , both outstanding) who investigate Amy's case? Can we trust what Amy tells us, via her diary? Is one of the spouses lying? Are they both lying? If so, to what end?

The film raises these questions and others, and it answers nearly all of them, often in boldface, all-caps sentences that end with exclamation points. It is not a subtle film, nor is it trying to be. As directed by David Fincher ("Se7en," " Zodiac ") and as adapted by Gillian Flynn from her bestselling potboiler, "Gone Girl" suggests one of those overheated, fairly comic-bookish "R"-rated thrillers that were everywhere in the late '80s and early '90s. Like those sorts of pictures, "Gone Girl" is dependent upon reversals of expectation and point-of-view. As soon as you get a handle on what it is, it becomes something else, then something else again. Describing its storyline in detail would ruin aspects that would be counted as selling points for anyone who hasn't read Flynn's book. That's why I'm being so vague.

Suffice to say that its explicit sex and violence and one-damn-thing-after-another, to-hell-with-realism plotting put it in the " Basic Instinct "/" Fatal Attraction "/" Presumed Innocent " wheelhouse. It is a metafictionally- minded version of a bloody domestic melodrama that actually uses the word "meta" (in a scene where Nick and the cops discuss his bar, which is named The Bar). It ties much of its mystery plot to an anniversary scavenger hunt with clues enclosed in numbered envelopes marked "clue." Key scenes revolve around public statements that are in some sense performances, and that are evaluated by onlookers in terms of their believability.

And yet it never crosses the line and becomes too much a deconstruction or parody. It's a plot-obsessed picture that's determined to stay one step ahead of the audience at all times, and cheats when it feels it has to. It is a perfect example of a sub-genre that the great critic Anne Billson has labeled " the preposterous thriller, " in which "characters and their behavior bear no relation not just to life as we know it, but to any sort of properly structured fiction we may have hitherto encountered."

Many classic and near-classic films can be slotted into this sub-genre. One of them is Alfred Hitchcock's " Vertigo ," a film in which the bad guy's scheme makes no sense if you think about it for longer than thirty seconds and that, in any event, would have unraveled had even the smallest part of it not gone precisely as envisioned . (How did Gavin and imposter-Maddie get out of the bell tower, anyway, without being seen by anybody, including Scottie? Was there a second stairwell? ) After "Gone Girl" I overheard a couple listing all the dropped plot threads and narrative holes big enough to hide aircraft carriers in. This isn't the sort of movie that can withstand that kind of scrutiny. You might as well say, "That part in my dream where the penguin told me where to dig for the treasure seemed unrealistic."

What of "Gone Girl" as a parable of gender relations, one that eventually takes an ugly misogynist turn? I've heard these charges leveled, and they have merit. You'll understand what I mean once you've seen the movie. At the same time, though, as we evaluate those complaints, we owe it to Flynn, Fincher and everyone involved to take into account what sort of film this is, what mode it's operating in, and how transparent it is about what it's doing, how it's doing it, and why. "Gone Girl" is a nightmare of love gone cold and a relationship gone south, coupled with an elaborate revenge fantasy that both exploits and reclaims sexist images and assumptions. It's also a film about a psychopath who turns an ordinary life into chaos. Like a lot of Hitchcock—and like certain domestic nightmares by such filmmakers as Brian De Palma and Luis Bunuel —each scene in the movie refers, however obliquely, to real fears, real emotions and real configurations of love or friendship. But at the same time, not a single frame is meant to be taken literally, as a documentary-like account of how people are, or should be, or shouldn't be. It's working through primordial feelings in the manner of a blues song, a pulp thriller, a film noir, or a horror picture.

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.

I'm not saying the film is genuinely clever throughout (though it is always fiendishly manipulative) or that every twist is defensible (a few are stupid). I'm saying that "Gone Girl" is what it is, that it knows what it is, and that it works. You know how well it's working when you hear how audiences laugh at it, and with it. Their laughter evolves as the film does. They laugh tentatively at first, then with an enthusiasm that gives way to a full-throated, "I endorse this madness!" gusto during the final half-hour, when the story spirals into DePalma-style expressionism and the picture becomes a maelstrom of blood, tears and other bodily fluids. There are allusions to the O.J. Simpson case, " Macbeth " and "Medea," and the ending is less an ending than a punchline that's all the more amusing for feeling so deflated.

That it's hard to tell whether Fincher has an opinion on anything he's showing us or is just sadistically bemused, like an evil child tormenting insects, somehow adds to the movie's dark vibrancy. This director is a misanthrope, no question. But misanthropes can be entertaining, and "Gone Girl" is that—not just in the scenes where women see through men and other women with furious contempt, but in throwaway moments, such as when an unseen man yells "Louder!" at the beleaguered Nick during a press conference, and when the film shows tourists gathered in front of Nick's bar, taking selfies. This is a sick film, and often brilliant.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film Credits

Gone Girl (2014)

Rated R for a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language

149 minutes

Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne

Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne

Carrie Coon as Margo Dunne

Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney

Patrick Fugit as Detective Jim Gulpin

Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt

Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collins

Missi Pyle as Ellen Abbott

Casey Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne

David Fincher
Gillian Flynn

Director of Photography

Jeff Cronenweth
Kirk Baxter

Original Music Composer

Trent Reznor
Atticus Ross

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By Manohla Dargis

Sept. 25, 2014

“Gone Girl,” the latest from that dark lord of cinema, David Fincher, opens with a man softly talking about his wife’s head. The image of his hand caressing a woman’s sleek blond hair in close-up indicates that it’s a lovely head, a lovely wife, too. Yet the violence of his words — he speaks of cracking her skull open and “unspooling” her brain — wakens an unease that trembles throughout this domestic horror movie. Those familiar with Mr. Fincher’s work may wonder, perhaps with a shudder or a conspiratorial smile, whether this head will share the fate of another head belonging to another pretty wife, a gift that was boxed and delivered in one of the hellish circles girdling his shocker “Seven.”

Unspooling is such an inapt word — can brains, after all, be unspooled? — that it immediately puts dread in check. No matter how brutal the images generated by these words, surely there’s more in store than blunt-force entertainment. Well, yes and no, which is sometimes the case with Mr. Fincher. One of those filmmakers whose technical prowess can make the mediocrity of his material seem irrelevant (almost), Mr. Fincher is always the star of his work. His art can overwhelm characters and their stories to the point that they fade away, leaving you with meticulous staging and framing, and edits as sharp as blades. It’s no accident that the first time you fully see Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), the man who had been discoursing so vividly about his wife’s head, he’s alone.

(“Gone Girl” opens the 52nd New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)

“ Gone Girl ” is set in the recessionary present in a small fictional Missouri town, North Carthage. Around the time you meet Nick, Mr. Fincher folds in some typical snapshots of desperate Anytown, U.S.A.: empty shops, vacant streets and homeless people tramping into the void. Nick and his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), aren’t headed for Brokesville quite yet, but they’re clinging hard to the status quo. They’re leasing their big, ugly house, and their bank account is running on fumes. The screenwriter, Gillian Flynn, adapting her novel of the same title, was a television critic for Entertainment Weekly who was laid off, and her characters share the same hard-knock fate: Nick, some kind of magazine writer, lost his New York job, as did Amy, who wrote quizzes for women’s magazines. (Was that a job? A. Yes, B. No, C. I doubt it.)

Times are hard, kind of, for Nick and Amy, but, as you discover in a series of flashbacks, they moved to North Carthage only when Nick’s mother received a cancer diagnosis. She died, and shortly after, so did the bloom on the marriage, though how it fades depends on who’s confessing and complaining. In the book, the narrative duties are fairly evenly distributed between Nick and Amy, who recount alternating versions of their happy times and unhappily ever after, with him taking you through events as they happen in the first person, while her point of view comes into focus partly through her detailed diary entries. The movie more or less duplicates this he-says, she-writes pattern, although with a critical difference: Nick’s story doesn’t unfold wholly through his first-person account.

Mr. Fincher, for all his modern themes and bleeding-edge technologies, is a classicist, and in “Gone Girl,” he creates a sense of Nick’s subjectivity the usual way, mostly by placing the camera next to the character and deploying point-of-view shots that are seamlessly integrated with shots of, and generated by, other characters. Shortly after the movie opens, the plot fires up, as you watch Nick return home to find that Amy has gone missing. You see him pick up their cat and watch him fling open doors, roam the halls and discover a broken glass table. In other words, here you know what Nick knows, which, as it will turn out, isn’t much. Amy is gone, and as Nick, the police, the town, the news media and the country shift into progressively more hysterical crisis-and-circus mode, she stays gone.

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Gone Girl Reviews

The film is a character study, an analysis of gender norms with a regressive, problematic underbelly that could easily be missed because the movie is so darn entertaining.

Full Review | Jun 12, 2024

Without prescriptions or clichés, Fincher manages to show the lights and shadows of the two central characters: the perfect marriage of the common man and the femme fatale. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 13, 2023

Tonally sloppy. Things happen to Ben Affleck; Ben Affleck doesn't make things happen.

Full Review | Aug 31, 2023

Yet another evidence of David Fincher's masterful visual filmmaking. With seamless editing, a memorable score, and fantastic camera work, Gone Girl is technically magnificent, but it's Gillian Flynn's debut screenplay that steals the spotlight.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 24, 2023

The mystery won't let up. Because the movie and the book formulate deeper doubts that, free from the boundaries of a procedural, allow us to generate (bitter) reflections on conjugal love. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 11, 2023

Shocking and delightfully sick, Gone Girl highlight’s America’s fascination with pop culture and the showboating of marriage bliss.

Full Review | Jun 23, 2023

... as smart as it is compelling, a wild ride as a mystery and a wickedly entertaining portrait of a marriage between two people who really don’t know each other.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2023

I’d love to watch it again, but I’m not sure there’s much to take ideologically from Gone Girl; no one should be proud of anything we might learn about ourselves from this.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

The visual presentation is moody and comfortless yet perfectly appropriate. And the music from Fincher favorites Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor creates atmospheres of tension.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

More than the poetry of misdirection, more than disappearances or curdling doubt, more than sinister motives or cunning manipulation, and more shocking than a singularly violent, bloody death, David Fincher's Gone Girl is a portrait of marriage.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 18, 2022

Employing crisp cinematography, atmospheric sound design, and an incredibly effective score, Fincher manages to utilize many of these crafts to create an engaging premise that sells an intriguing thematic insight.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 27, 2022

A brilliant example of a book-to-film adaptation that managed to stay faithful to the novel, while also injecting the story with its own inventive style.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2021

Fincher combines a maze-like plot with brutal drama to create an unmissable thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 26, 2021

The dirty little secret of Gone Girl is that Amy never hated men as so many have alleged. Women had always been the true targets of her disdain.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2021

Not great art, but it is an artfully made potboiler with memorable performances and slick direction that will keep you guessing until the end.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Gone Girl not only entertains, but engages the viewer. This is one creepy masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 31, 2021

Deliciously twisted!

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 3, 2021

Fincher and Flynn marry conventions of the thriller with conventions of rom-com, creating a game for the audience to follow along the way.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2020

Built with a masterful touch.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 4, 2020

Watching Gone Girl was like watching Fatal Attraction, Misery and War of the Roses all wrapped up in one and yet you still couldn't get close to what this film was.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 15, 2020

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Film Review: ‘Gone Girl’

Director David Fincher and stars Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck are at the top of their game in this mesmerizing adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel.

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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A lady vanishes and is soon presumed dead, but it’s her marriage that winds up on the autopsy table in “ Gone Girl ,” David Fincher ’s intricate and richly satisfying adaptation of Gillian Flynn ’s 2012 mystery novel. Surgically precise, grimly funny and entirely mesmerizing over the course of its swift 149-minute running time, this taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material, fully expressing Fincher’s cynicism about the information age and his abiding fascination with the terror and violence lurking beneath the surfaces of contemporary American life. Graced with a mordant wit as dry and chilled as a good Chablis, as well as outstanding performances from Ben Affleck and a revelatory Rosamund Pike , Fox’s Oct. 3 wide release should push past its preordained Oscar-contender status to galvanize the mainstream.

After the perceived commercial disappointment of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2011), despite an eventual worldwide haul of more than $230 million, Fincher’s latest R-rated, two-and-a-half-hour screen version of a phenomenally successful potboiler will have an easier time translating its considerable pedigree, critical plaudits and awards-season hype into must-see status. It helps that the director is working on a significantly lower budget this time around (about $50 million), from a novel that has neither steeped too long in the public consciousness nor spawned any prior movies. It also helps that “Gone Girl,” unlike “Dragon Tattoo,” registers as more than just a technically immaculate, dramatically superfluous exercise in style.

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Employing a quick still-shot montage to capture the well-kept lawns and empty storefronts of North Carthage, a sleepy Missouri town hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis, “Gone Girl” opens on the morning of the Dunnes’ fifth wedding anniversary, the same morning Amy inexplicably disappears from their home. Although Nick claims to have no idea what’s happened to his wife, it takes him little time to rouse the suspicions of Det. Rhonda Boney ( Kim Dickens ), whose thorough sweep of the premises and dogged investigation of his personal life yield considerable evidence that the Dunnes’ marriage, like their finances, has fallen on tough times.

As the case against Nick begins to mount, his seemingly insufficient displays of grief make him an easy target for professional witch hunters like Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle), a Nancy Grace-like cable harridan who leads the charge against him. It’s not long before Nick is being coached by not only his tough-but-loyal twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), but also a high-powered defense attorney, Tanner Bolt ( Tyler Perry ). Among other things, “Gone Girl” functions as a wickedly entertaining satire of our scandal-obsessed, trash-TV-addicted media culture; this is a movie as conversant with the tawdry true-crime sagas of Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony as it is with classic thrillers of domestic entrapment like “Rebecca,” “Diabolique,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Fatal Attraction.”

Through it all, the missing Mrs. Dunne remains a strong, insistent screen presence, popping up in regular flashbacks to her earlier, happier days in New York, where this brainy and beautiful young woman led a life of luxury, sophistication and modest celebrity. The full arc of her relationship with Nick, a working-class Midwesterner, comes into focus: their blissful first encounter and marriage in Manhattan; the slow draining of their resources, exacerbated by their layoffs from their writing jobs; and their eventual relocation to Nick’s Missouri hometown, where he sinks into laziness and despair, leaving Amy trapped in Nowheresville with a man who has lost all motivation to make her happy. Whispers of domestic violence, spousal neglect and infidelity emerge, and other suspicious figures flit into the frame, including Desi Collings ( Neil Patrick Harris ), a dapper ex-boyfriend of Amy’s, and Noelle Hawthorne (Casey Wilson), her meddlesome neighborhood pal.

It soon becomes clear that the central mystery of “Gone Girl” will hinge not on what happened to Amy, but rather on who she and Nick really are, and what brought them to this fateful point in their marriage — a question that the two leads’ initially poker-faced performances are in no hurry to answer. Whether it’s darting between past and present, or juxtaposing Amy’s cryptic diary entries with the handwritten clues she left behind as part of a fifth-anniversary “treasure hunt” for Nick, Flynn’s screenplay has an unusual ability to keep the story moving on multiple levels, commanding the viewer’s attention with nary an act of explicit violence for most of the film’s runtime. And when “Gone Girl” springs the first of several game-changing reversals around the halfway point, the pleasure stems less from shock value (negligible for those who’ve read the book) than from the sheer delight the filmmakers seem to take in pulling us deeper into their labyrinth.

Fincher is by now well versed in the art of misdirection, and his control of this material is assured and absolute. This is hardly the first time he’s forced us to question what we’re seeing and through whose eyes we’re seeing it (“Fight Club”), or examined the media’s tendency to distort and amplify paranoia (“Zodiac”), or juggled parallel time frames and dueling perspectives so as to complicate our sense of the truth (“The Social Network”). But what makes “Gone Girl” so particularly potent — and such an appropriate match for this filmmaker’s icy view of the human condition — is its deliciously cynical attitude toward the relationship at its core; its sly awareness of the thin line between love and hate, happiness and misery; and its skill at laying bare the cruel, manipulative behavioral patterns that spouses can lapse into over time.

Likely to elicit uncomfortable chuckles of recognition from women and men alike, the film views marriage as a performance of sorts, a contract under which husband and wife agree to a certain measure of pretense. The need to perform, privately as well as publicly, becomes quite literal in Nick and Amy’s case, and “Gone Girl” finally pushes this premise into a realm of nightmarish Grand Guignol absurdity. As it reaches a denouement that stays completely faithful to the novel’s wrap-up ( early reports to the contrary ), we’re left to entertain the notion that we may never know the whole truth about the person to whom we’ve said “I do” — and indeed, we’re probably better off not knowing.

Affleck has done some of his finest screen work playing men of power and privilege suddenly brought low by fate (George Reeves in “Hollywoodland,” a laid-off executive in “The Company Men”), and he’s perfectly cast as Nick Dunne, bringing just the right golden-boy-gone-to-seed air to a character who is slowly deprived of his dignity and privacy, inch by cruel inch. Often unfairly criticized early in his career for seeming smug, vain and inauthentic onscreen, Affleck is uniquely suited to the role of a man facing those very charges from a fickle and demanding public; it’s a tricky turn, requiring a measure of careful underplaying and emotional aloofness, and he nails it completely.

Still, as its title suggests, “Gone Girl” belongs to its leading lady. Pike is the sort of elegantly composed blonde beauty with whom Hitchcock would have had a field day, and some may well quibble that the actress’s cool British hauteur doesn’t fully capture Amy’s America’s-sweetheart side. Yet as evidenced by her years of solid supporting work, she also possesses the sort of ferocious charisma that magnetizes the screen, and it’s a thrill to watch her fully embrace the showiest, most substantial role of her career. Hers is the low, seductive voice we hear coaxing us through the story’s early passages, and hers is the character who ultimately exhibits the most dynamic range: In any given scene, her Amy can seem vulnerable, aggrieved, calculating, heroic, overmatched, viperous and terrifying.

Flynn’s novel has drawn criticism in some quarters for its alleged misogyny, a highly debatable charge that is largely neutralized here by the atmosphere of gender-blind misanthropy that pervades much of the director’s work. And in the end, Pike’s performance is too singular and vivid to be reduced to simplistic terms of degradation or empowerment; suffice to say that Amy Dunne earns her place alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Lisbeth Salander in Fincher’s gallery of pitiable-yet-monstrous protagonists, whose refusal to beg for the audience’s sympathy is exactly what makes them such undeniable objects of fascination.

The outstanding leads aside, nearly every scene of “Gone Girl” is dotted with terrific supporting players, all of whom fit seamlessly into its broad yet highly specific snapshot of post-recession American life — a portrait that stretches from a Manhattan literary enclave to a cabin hideaway in the Ozarks. Perry and Harris play expertly against type as the media-savvy lawyer and the creepy ex-boyfriend, respectively, while Pyle and Sela A. Ward give sharp turns as two rather different TV personalities who play their parts in spinning the Dunne saga for the outside world. David Clennon and especially Lisa Banes are the very picture of WASP entitlement as Amy’s socialite parents, while Dickens and Coon inject a contrasting note of blue-collar dependability as two women who struggle, not always easily, to give Nick a fair hearing.

As ever, Fincher’s behind-the-scenes collaborators turn in work of an exceptionally high standard. His camera unerringly well placed in every scene, d.p. Jeff Cronenweth brings a drab, underlit look to the Dunnes’ McMansion, the police station and other North Carthage locations (actually Cape Girardeau, Mo.), suitably nondescript in Donald Graham Burt’s production design. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose moody electronic compositions have become synonymous with the director’s work, once again devise a soundscape that all but pulses with dread, this time by lacing more traditional orchestral fare with their trademark synths.

Working without his usual partner Angus Wall (with whom he won Oscars for “The Social Network” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”), editor Kirk Baxter cuts the picture to within an inch of its life while still allowing individual scenes and the overall structure to breathe; this is a movie you sink into even when you’re on the edge of your seat. Particularly fraught, violent moments are heightened by quick fade-ins and fade-outs, a hallucinatory effect that registers as palpably as a shudder.

Reviewed at Fox Studios, Century City, Calif., Sept. 15, 2014. (In New York Film Festival — opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 149 MIN.

Production: A 20th Century Fox release presented with Regency Enterprises in association with TSG Entertainment. Produced by Arnon Milchan, Reese Witherspoon, Cean Chaffin, Joshua Donen. Executive producers, Leslie Dixon, Bruna Papandrea.
Crew: Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay, Gillian Flynn, based on her novel. Camera (color, widescreen, Red Digital Cinema), Jeff Cronenweth; editor, Kirk Baxter; music, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; supervising art director, Sue Chan; set decorator, Douglas Mowat; set designers, Timothy Croshaw, Barbara Mesney, Thomas T. Taylor, Jane Wuu; costume designer, Trish Summerville; sound (Dolby Digital), Steve Cantamessa; sound designer, Ren Klyce; re-recording mixers, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick; special effects supervisor, Ron Bolanowski; visual effects supervisor, Eric Barba; visual effects, Digital Domain, Ollin VFX, Artemple — Hollywood, Lola/VFX, Savaga Visual Effects, Cos FX Films; stunt coordinator, Mickey Giacomazzi; associate producer, James Davidson; assistant director, Courtenay Miles; casting, Laray Mayfield.
With: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski, Casey Wilson, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela A. Ward.

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<i>Gone Girl</i> Plays a Fatal Game of Love and Marriage

Gone Girl Plays a Fatal Game of Love and Marriage

Looking for a review that doesn’t spoil the ending? Or do you want to read every piece of analysis about the unexpected twists of a movie like Gone Girl after you’ve seen it? We’re debuting a new feature on Time.com, developed by TIME’s tech lead Mark Parolisi , that lets you have it both ways. Click here to reveal the full analysis if you’ve already seen the film (the spoilers will be in bold), and click again if you change your mind (the spoilers will appear blurred).

Their courtship was a dream: the meeting of attractive opposites — two journalists for New York magazines — reviving the fond banter of film stars past. On their first date, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a small-town Midwesterner at ease in the big city, took rich, elegant Manhattanite Amy Elliott (Rosamund Pike) on a pre-dawn stroll to a bakery and kissed her, as powdered sugar fluttered around them like the finest snowflakes. Later, at a press party for the Amazing Amy children’s books her parents had written about her, Nick pretended to interview her and, from his notebook, removed an engagement ring.

A man — a woman too, but for now, the man — puts a lot of effort into the courtship role. He plays, he may even briefly be , the charming, considerate fellow, attentive to his woman’s every need or whim, just like the hero of some classic romantic comedy that ends at the altar. But that’s just the Old Hollywood version; in real life, the wedding is the beginning of a different story. And if courtship is a movie, marriage is a job that can become a grinding routine, an Ever After without the Happily. In the morning-after cinders of the honeymoon glow, a man may ignore his bride and find a younger woman with whom he can play another exciting game: adultery.

Did you ever wonder, even for an instant, if you could kill your spouse? Or be killed by the one you wed? And, if not, could others imagine it of you? Those are some of the taunts running through Gone Girl , the Gillian Flynn novel and the taut, faithful movie that she, as screenwriter, and David Fincher have made from it. In a property with all the killer-thriller tricks — sudden disappearance and violent death, dark motives and cunning misdirection — the true creepiness of Gone Girl is in its portrait of a marriage gone sour, curdled from its emotional and erotic liberation of courtship into a life sentence together, till death do they part. In Gone Girl , marriage is a prison, and each spouse is both jailer and inmate — perhaps even executioner, too.

Soon after the wedding, Nick and Amy lost their jobs. When he learned from his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) that their mother was dying of cancer, Nick abruptly decided to move back to North Carthage, Mo., and take Amy with him. They sold their brownstone — Amy’s brownstone — at a loss. Nick and Margo bought a bar, with Amy’s money, and he taught a journalism class at the community college. (In the book the course is called “How to Launch a Career in Magazines” — a little joke from Flynn, who became a full-time novelist when she was cashiered after a decade at Entertainment Weekly .) When not tending bar with Margo, Nick has kindled an affair with sexy student Andie (Emily Ratajkowski), which leaves Amy alone at home, with no job, doing… hey, what is this brilliant, industrious woman doing? Nick has no idea.

One thing that consumed her interest was preparing a treasure hunt for their fifth wedding anniversary, as she has done each year before: offering clues in rhyme to the hiding places of various gifts. But around noon on the big day, Nick discovers that Amy is gone from their home. Signs of a struggle, and blood wiped from the kitchen floor, suggest she was abducted, possibly murdered. She and Nick were heard arguing the night before, and when word of his affair gets around, he becomes the prime suspect — if not to Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), the tough but sympathetic senior detective on the case, then to the neighbors and the avid, rabid media. Amy has left a diary, the record of a devoted wife’s growing suspicions and gnawing fear of her swine of a spouse, as well as the first clue in a brand-new treasure hunt. Nick now must juggle three uncomfortable roles: villain, victim and sleuth.

On the page, Gone Girl was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character’s side every few pages. Flynn simply — or, rather, complexly — interwove the narratives: Nick’s in the present, revealing more of his sins as he tracks the treasure-hunt clues, and Amy’s in the past, through her diary. He-said–she-said is fine for books, but movies play with the cinematic precept that seeing is believing: we show, you swallow. Given the dueling narratives, of which one, both or neither may be exactly true, it’s pretty impressive that Flynn and Fincher have managed to transfer this bookish jest successfully to the screen. The film amasses evidence against Nick through his own misdeeds, which we see, and through the testimony of Amy’s diary — a silk scarf that may become a noose — which we are shown. Like the novel, the movie detonates its big twist halfway through. So film reviewers must juggle the same ethical dilemma that faced book critics: whether or not to reveal the story’s shocking middle .

So here: Amy, exasperated with her lazy, careless husband and the glum life he had forced her into, faked her own murder and fashioned clues in the diary and the treasure hunt to frame him. She had carefully filched enough cash to live on while she moved in anonymity to the Ozarks. When she was robbed of her money, she contacted Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), with whom she had a teenage affair and who remained desperately smitten, to set her up in his remote lakeside villa. Watching Nick’s declaration of love for her on tabloid TV, Amy decided he might after all be the man for her. Now she just had to figure out a way to explain her disappearance. That meant finding a new male villain.

“You’re not too smart, are you,” says sultry Kathleen Turner to full-of-himself William Hurt in the 1981 Body Heat . “I like that in a man.” In that Lawrence Kasdan thriller, the Turner character — who plays games and goes missing — has a temperature that runs “a couple of degrees high, around a hundred.” Amy is just the opposite: a cucumber-cool conniver, whose treasure hunt is, among other things, a test for Nick, to see if he’s as smart as he thinks he is. If so, he might be a worthy companion after all, suitable for siring a child — another Amazing Amy? Amy’s life was always partly fiction, from the time her parents wrote books about a fantasy image of their daughter: She became an expert at live-action role-playing, as a child, as Desi’s lover, then as Nick’s one-and-only. If she twists her own original plot, and returns to Nick, he’s bound to be as attentive as in their courtship. If not from gratitude, then from fear she can find a way to do him in.

Fincher tried a faithful version of a best-seller last time out, with his Americanization of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . That was a stillborn exercise compared with Gone Girl , which brings Nick and Amy to attractive, plausible life, and surrounds them with exemplary character actors. Kudos to Dickens, to David Clennon and Lisa Banes as Amy’s parents. (Also noteworthy are Scoot McNairy and Lola Kirke as friends you might not want to meet on the road. Only Harris disappoints; he lacks the hovering menace and ultimate bafflement of a stalker-lover.)

In Se7en and Fight Club , Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac , his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in The Social Network , the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend’s betrayal. There will be blood in Gone Girl , but some of the most startling moments are glancing — Amy’s quick kiss that includes a lip bite — and claustrophobic. What can be more ominous than the proximity of two people who are supposed to be in love but may have murder in mind?

Any readers, as they submerge themselves into a novel, automatically make the movie version in their heads. They cast it, too. For Gone Girl , they imagined Affleck as the only Nick, the way Gone With the Wind ’s first readers preemptively saw Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Good old Ben Affable, with his softness and weaselly charm, not to mention the cleft in his chin, seemed an ideal fit for the likable, not totally trustworthy Nick. The actor has played the bluff, fervent lover before, most notably in a terrific 1997 Kevin Smith rom-com called, yep, Chasing Amy ; and in The Company Men he was the smug suburbanite who gets a comeuppance when he loses his job. It’s no surprise that Affleck slips into the role with the nervous aplomb of a man who starts to realize that the stroll he’s taking may lead to his own hanging.

For Amy, many readers envisioned Cate Blanchett or Charlize Theron; each could play a blond vixen capable of seducing and scaring a husband. But instead, the role went to the lesser-known Rosamund Pike. (Among her roles in Hollywood films: Andromeda in Wrath of the Titans and Tom Cruise’s helper in Jack Reacher .) Pike’s relative unfamiliarity to the mass audience allows her to draw Amy in careful cursive on a blank slate. We know of Pike’s Amy only what we see here: She is pretty, poised, always alert, ready to flash the witty remark that illuminates or scolds. She lives inside Amy’s brilliance, suggesting that the sunniest face can harbor the darkest intent.

In a movie of subtle tones and wild swerves, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part.

Note: An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the actor Scoot McNairy.

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Movie Review

'Gone Girl' review

By Ross Miller
on October 2, 2014 09:00 am

I can’t stop thinking about Gone Girl . Not because of any maddening, unresolved plot twist; it’s just emotionally draining. If I had written this review immediately after walking out of the screening, the only thing I’d be able to say is that we’ve been given another brilliant-yet-imperfect David Fincher movie that fits neatly alongside the director’s other recent works, The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo .

But like The Social Network , the interwoven storylines here all serve as a satire of modern life. Fincher’s entire body of work, which also includes Fight Club and Se7en , is punctuated with moments of physical and emotional violence used to contrast cultural mores. Gone Girl succeeds as a critique of the marketplace of ideas — a rationale that, in free and public discourse, the truth will always emerge from competing ideas.

The marketplace of ideas, according to Gone Girl , is bullshit.

Gone Girl is the story of Amy and Nick Dunne (Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, respectively) — New York expatriates who find themselves living a mundane existence in suburban Missouri, where Nick grew up. On their fifth anniversary, Nick comes home to find a broken coffee table and no Amy in sight. An investigation into her disappearance unearths evidence suggesting Amy was murdered — with Nick as the prime suspect. At the same time, the court of public opinion (as rallied by tabloid media) has already tried and convicted Nick without so much as an arrest. It's not because of any conclusive evidence; it's because from the onset, Nick is really, truly unlikeable. Therefore, he must be guilty.

It takes a while to understand Affleck's character, who in the first 20 minutes seems distant, numb, and uncaring. (My only gripe with the film is that the pacing early on feels a bit off.) Both Affleck and Pike give incredibly nuanced performances, each tasked with portraying multiple facades at various times. Second to them would be Tyler Perry and Carrie Coon as Nick's attorney and twin sister, respectively, who are there to teach Nick that what he says isn't as important as how he says it — be it to them, to friends and family, to the public at large. Every supporting character in Gone Girl ultimately serves as an effective foil to Nick and Amy, challenging how they present themselves to the world and the consequences thereof.

The movie jumps between past and present, the story at times told from the direct points of view of Nick or Amy. It can get hard to follow, and there isn't a clear change in visual style to indicate time à la Memento . Time is tracked via titling, by the number of days since Amy went missing, and supplemented with voiceover. It's an important tool used sparingly enough, offering a contrast to what the narrator is feeling when their outward appearance suggests the opposite.

Again, it’s all about presentation. The point Gone Girl makes over and over again, implicitly and often explicitly, is that truth on its own isn’t enough — if it's even necessary at all. This is Gillian Flynn, who wrote both the screenplay and the original book it’s based on, speaking at a panel after the Gone Girl screening:

It's a movie about storytelling. It's a movie about the stories we tell ourselves. The stories we tell other people and also with the media, this greek chorus kind of blowing up large.

Later, she continues:

It's the idea that someone else's tragedy is something that we consume. We are consumers of tragedy when we tune into those shows and what that means to package and produce someone else's tragedy. How someone immediately becomes the villain and someone becomes the hero and how they're cast against our wills.

This is the perfect movie for David Fincher. The intentions of the characters, good or bad, are never judged — Fincher never takes a side. The consequences are determined by what's presented, not what's honest or even fair. And by the end of the movie, the audience is left with an uneasy feeling that the mob mentality, the sensational tabloid media, and the false moral high grounds depicted in the film are all too close to our own reality.

In the world of Gone Girl , the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work — or rather, it doesn’t matter. This is a narrative driven not by the truth but by the perspective thereof. All that matters is how you sell it — and to whom.

That’s the argument Fincher and Flynn have made with Gone Girl , and it’s very convincing.

Gone Girl opens Friday, October 3rd

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'Gone Girl': The reviews are in

“Marriage is hard work,” says Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

The longer one has been married, the greater one understands the meaning behind the phrase “honeymoon period.” In David Fincher’s adaptation of Flynn’s bestseller, the magical romance between Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) has hit the wall five years in. They fall in love in New York City, but when they both lose their magazine jobs and his mother falls ill in Missouri, they move to his hometown and quickly drift apart. How far apart? Nick may have murdered her.

When Amy goes missing on the day of the fifth anniversary, Nick is the primary suspect. The local cops can’t believe all the evidence against him, and any sympathy he initially gets from the news media vanishes once some of his secrets come to light.

Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, worked hard to translate the he-said/she-said storytelling, and Fincher wrings the most out of the film’s twists and turns—even though millions of readers already know when to expect them. “I can’t guarantee that the film’s ending will work for everyone (it was always my one nit to pick with Flynn’s novel),” writes EW ‘s Chris Nashawaty. “But I will say this: Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face.”

Read more from EW ’s review, as well as a roundup of other notable critics, below.

Chris Nashawaty ( Entertainment Weekly ) ▲

“There were reasons to be wary, of course. Was Ben Affleck too smug—and let’s face it, too on-the-nose—to play the callow Nick Dunne? Was Rosamund Pike too icily ethereal and untested to play his missing wife, Amy? And how would the film handle the novel’s just-short-of-preposterous Big Reveal? Well, the answers are no, no, and… masterfully. Fincher and Flynn’s film gets just about everything right.”

Ann Hornaday ( Washington Post )

“ Gone Girl is a “yes, but” movie: Yes, it’s well-made, but it stays maddeningly on its own polished surfaces. It’s smart, but not clever or probing or risky enough to be truly brilliant. It’s absorbing, but not terribly deep, memorable or, finally, all that much fun to watch.”

Manohla Dargis ( New York Times )

“At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage … Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.”

Liam Lacey ( Toronto Globe and Mail ) ▲

“Affleck’s handsome mug and shifty, uneasy manner have never been better suited to a role. … The pretty English actress Pike, whose range has extended from the decorative ( Barney’s Version ) to slyly amusing ( An Education ), is a revelation (though the details can’t be revealed here) as a character of near-mythic self-absorption.”

Justin Chang ( Variety ) ▲

“Pike is the sort of elegantly composed blonde beauty with whom Hitchcock would have had a field day, and some may well quibble that the actress’s cool British hauteur doesn’t fully capture Amy’s America’s-sweetheart side. Yet … she also possesses the sort of ferocious charisma that magnetizes the screen…”

David Edelstein ( New York )

“I never thought I’d write these words, but [Affleck] carries the movie. He’s terrific. Fincher exploits—and helps him transcend—his most common failing, a certain handsome-lug lack of commitment. … Affleck’s Nick doesn’t mourn convincingly or look remotely honest—even when he tells the truth.”

Richard Roeper ( Chicago Sun-Times )

“This story cannot be taken too seriously. It’s filled with bad people who sometimes pull off brilliant stunts—and then follow a stunt with an act of blatant stupidity. But it’s a thing of beauty watching them manipulate, stumble, recover, stumble again, and then… more madness.”

Mick LaSalle ( San Francisco Chronicle )

“If only the dip in quality came in the middle, or even at the beginning, we might still be able to class Gone Girl as among the year’s best. But when a movie, in its final minutes, forsakes its own logic and embraces false cleverness, that can’t be ignored.”

Richard Corliss ( TIME )

“The true creepiness of Gone Girl is in its portrait of a marriage gone sour, curdled from its emotional and erotic liberation of courtship into a life sentence together, till death do they part. In Gone Girl , marriage is a prison, and each spouse is both jailer and inmate— perhaps even executioner, too.”

Kenneth Turan ( Los Angeles Times ) ▲

“Fincher, whose work can be gratuitously disturbing ( Seven ) as well as formally impressive ( The Social Network ), is by nature a chilly director, a temperament that meshes well with the unsettlingly bleak view of human nature that Gone Girl is all about.”

Todd McCarthy ( Hollywood Reporter )

“[ Gone Girl ] is a sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director’s adaptation of another publishing phenomenon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: ‘Is that all there is?'”

Overall Metacritic rating (1-100): 79

Rotten Tomatoes: 86 percent

Length: 145 minutes

Starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry

Directed by David Fincher

Distributor: Fox

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David Fincher Puts Ben Affleck’s Evasiveness to Good Use in Gone Girl

Oh, what a stunning opening shot—a prelude to damnation—director David Fincher serves up in his elegantly wicked suburban noir Gone Girl, adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best-selling novel. It’s the back of the head of a woman (Rosamund Pike) on a pillow, her golden tresses aglow. An unseen man (Ben Affleck) narrates; he suggests that the only way to know what’s in a person’s mind would be to shatter her skull. Then the woman turns her face to the camera. It’s creamy-skinned, sleepily beautiful; her eyes open wide and she stares into ours. The look is teasingly ambiguous. Juxtaposed with the narrator’s violent words, the image poses the question: Who could want to violate a façade so exquisite? You want to pore over it, study it for clues to what’s underneath.

You get that chance for many of Gone Girl ’s 148 minutes. The movie is phenomenally gripping—although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people. Though a woman wrote the script, the male gaze dominates, and this particular male—the director of Se7en and The Social Network —doesn’t have much faith in appearances, particularly women’s. Fincher’s is a world of masks, misrepresentations, subtle and vast distortions. Truth is rarely glimpsed. Media lie. Surfaces lie.

The maybe-lying protagonist is Nick Dunne, an ex–magazine writer who’s about to celebrate his fifth anniversary with his wife, Amy, but who sits that afternoon in the Missouri bar he runs with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), drinking bourbon, looking somber and antsy. He arrives at his suburban McMansion to find a glass coffee table smashed, signs of a struggle, and no Amy. So far so straightforward. But two detectives, Boney (Kim Dickens) and Gilpin (Patrick Fugit), linger over the incongruities of the crime scene. It’s clear that Nick is being evasive about something. Did he kill Amy? We did hear him say he’d like to smash in someone’s head.

Gone Girl weaves the story of Nick’s descent into public infamy with excerpts from a diary kept by Amy in a curly, cultivated hand. She describes an impossibly sexy New York courtship and a marriage that begins like a romance novel. Still, Amy knows how unattainable the ideals of fiction can be. She grew up as the subject of her parents’ books for children, the model for a character called Amazing Amy. How could she measure up to her literary counterpart? While she gave up the cello at age 10, Amazing Amy went on to become a virtuoso: The failure haunts her. The rest of Amy’s tale turns out to be fairly conventional: It tracks her enchantment, gradual disillusionment, and, finally, fear that her husband will kill her. But something’s off about Amy in the movie’s flashbacks. She’s telling us the most personal details of her life, yet she looks like a sleek, aristocratic doll, a projection. There’s a suggestion of panic beneath her glassy demeanor, but it’s faint. She’s unnervingly near perfect.

Fincher and his cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, shoot their characters from just below eye level. The angles aren’t extreme—just slanted enough to catch the ceilings, to suggest how hemmed in these people are by circumstance and stupid choices and a house (the production design is by Donald Graham Burt, the spooky astral music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) that’s like purgatory in beige. Actors seem constricted anyway in Fincher’s films. They’re made to speak their smart-ass dialogue at a brisk clip, with no Method dawdling. In this case, the effect on Affleck’s acting is remarkable.

I never thought I’d write these words, but he carries the movie. He’s terrific. Fincher exploits—and helps him transcend—his most common failing, a certain handsome-lug lack of commitment. Affleck shows intelligence and sensitivity in interviews, and I sense that as he has gotten older (and become a slick director), he has worked harder to look serious, sincere, and engaged onscreen. But some part of him holds back, and that’s the part on which Fincher homes in. Affleck’s Nick doesn’t mourn convincingly or look remotely honest—even when he tells the truth. In one scene, his hotshot lawyer (a genial Tyler Perry) rehearses him for a TV appearance and pelts Nick with candy when he sounds like he’s lying. He gets pelted a lot. It’s an almost impossible task to get Affleck’s Nick to sound like he’s speaking from the heart, and you can see the frustration in Affleck’s eyes at his own inability to get fully into the role. He’s trying to connect his face with his head and falling short.

About Pike I must—at the behest of the movie’s publicists—say less, although her acting is also a study in acting. In those few moments when the mask slips, she’s tight, frightened, childishly vulnerable, desperately grasping for a sense of control that the universe has denied her. I loved looking at her. The other actors—sticking to Fincher’s metronome—give fast, shorthand performances. Coon is likably attuned to Affleck’s rhythms: Nick and Margo’s fairly honest rapport (a rarity) can be attributed to their having shared a womb. Dickens is delightfully acidic as the cop, and Neil Patrick Harris is pitiful to the point of eeriness as Amy’s old suitor. There’s also a satisfyingly scathing turn by Missi Pyle as Nancy Grace (going under the name “Ellen Abbott”), a ghoulish specialist in raising media lynch mobs.

I can’t leave Gone Girl without going back to its depiction of women, though here I risk the dreaded “spoiler.” (Stop reading if you wish.) The timing for a film that features instances of trumped-up sexual assaults could hardly be worse, and while it’s nowhere near as extreme as Fatal Attraction —which discredited feminist shibboleths by putting them in the mouth of a psychopath—the movie, like the novel, plays to the stereotype of weak men entrapped by pretend-helpless women. The Spider Woman is, of course, a noir archetype, and I’m not prepared to renounce my affection for Double Indemnity and its ilk. But I can’t say those movies don’t have real-world consequences, and coming in the middle of mounting outrage over the pervasiveness of sexual abuse, I’d hate to see the likes of Rush Limbaugh buoyed by the film’s bloodcurdling specimen of a predatory slut. For the rest of us, it’s preferable to view Gone Girl as a profoundly cynical portrait of all sides of all relationships: First you’re blind to the truth of other people, then you see and wish you could go back to being blind. See it with your sweetie!

*This article appears in the September 22, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

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Gone Girl Review

Where's amy.

Gone Girl is a powerful adaptation of a complex book told in the vein of a deliciously pulpy crime thriller. As in Gillian Flynn's novel, there's far more to this tale than initially meets the eye. For Gone Girl is ultimately the story of a tortured, noxious, violent relationship that is also, often, unnervingly relatable. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can chat with her on Twitter: @RothCornet , or follow Roth-IGN on IGN.

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Critics Consensus

Critics consensus: gone girl is certified fresh, plus, annabelle , left behind , and new tv..

TAGGED AS: Certified Fresh

This week at the movies, we’ve got a mysterious disappearance ( Gone Girl , starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike ), a spooky doll ( Annabelle , starring Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton ), and the end of the world ( Left Behind , starring Nicolas Cage and Lea Thompson ). What do the critics have to say?

As the old promotional tagline goes, “You’ve read the book — now see the movie!” In the case of David Fincher ‘s Gone Girl (adapted from Gillian Flynn ‘s page-turning bestseller), critics say that’s sage advice, for the film is a psychologically penetrating thriller that’s chilling and darkly funny — and it features a performance from Rosamund Pike that’s likely to catapult her to the big-time. Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Pike) are a seemly idyllic couple. However, when Amy goes missing, and the media descends on their small Midwestern town, Nick looks increasingly suspicious. The pundits say the Certified Fresh Gone Girl is well-acted, intelligent, and deeply unsettling — in short, what we’ve come to expect from Fincher. (Watch our video interview with the cast and crew here .)

That creepy doll Annabelle cut such a striking presence in The Conjuring that she got her own movie. Unfortunately, the critics say it’s too bad she couldn’t get a better one; despite a few undeniably effective scares, Annabelle is by and large a compendium of horror movie cliches. A young couple with a baby on the way witnesses the shocking murder of their neighbors by a satanic cult. Soon, our heroes experience sinister goings-on throughout their house ; could that weird vintage doll the husband purchased be the cause? The pundits say Annabelle is a pretty generic haunted house flick, though it’s spooky enough on occasion to wish it were more.

Left Behind

Nicolas Cage plus the Book of Revelations should equal apocalyptic excitement, right? Apparently not. Critics are less than — ahem — enraptured by Left Behind ; they say it’s a limp, clumsily crafted potboiler with cheesy special effects and minimal character development. Based upon the bestselling novels by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, the film stars Cage as Rayford Steele, a disaffected airline pilot who witnesses several passengers and crew members vanish in mid-flight. Steele must safely land the plane while chaos reigns on the ground. The pundits say Left Behind is mostly amateurish and largely bereft of thrills.

Fresh on TV this week:

This Amazon Prime dramedy is winning high praise for its honest, empathetic, and funny depiction of a dysfunctional family; critics say Transparent (98 percent) features top-notch performances from the likes of Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Gaby Hoffmann, and many more.

Gracepoint (73 percent) is an American adaptation of the critically-adored British detective series Broadchurch , both of which star David Tennant. And while critics say it’s not quite as sharp as its predecessor, it’s sophisticated and stylish, and features a strong lead performance from Anna Gunn.

Also opening this week in limited release:

Nas: Time Is Illmatic , a documentary about the making of one of hip hop’s greatest albums, is at 100 percent.

Last Hijack , a documentary about the life of a Somali pirate, is at 100 percent.

The Blue Room , a thriller about a man whose adulterous affairs lead to serious trouble, is at 90 percent.

For Those In Peril , a drama about a man who survives a mysterious fishing boat accident off the coast of Scotland, is at 89 percent.

The Good Lie , starring Reese Witherspoon in a drama about a group of Sudanese refugees who attempt to make new lives for themselves in the United States, is at 85 percent (check out our interview with the cast here ).

Copenhagen , a drama about a man who befriends a teenage girl while searching for his grandfather in Denmark, is at 83 percent.

Harmontown , a documentary portrait of Community creator Dan Harmon , is at 60 percent.

The Decent One , a documentary about how Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler thought about his actions, is at 50 percent.

Men, Women & Children , starring Jennifer Garner and Adam Sandler in a dramedy about the ways that technology has changed the way that parents and teens communicate, is at 40 percent.

Inner Demons , a horror film about reality show subject who appears to be a drug addict but may be suffering from something even scarier, is at 40 percent.

A Good Marriage , starring Joan Allen and Anthony LaPaglia in a thriller about a woman who makes a shocking discovery about her husband, is at 38 percent.

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By Peter Travers

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David Fincher’s shockingly good film version of Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another. Expect a stampede at the box office. Gone Girl is a movie of its cultural moment, an era when divorce won’t cut it if there are options for lethal revenge and aggravated assault. In the toxic marriage of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Amy Elliott (Rosamund Pike), both partners are equal-opportunity liars and cheats. Or almost equal. Arguments between the sexes are going to be heated.

In her 2012 bestseller, Gillian Flynn made wicked sport of marriage in the new millennium. Working from an incisively shaped script by Flynn herself, director Fincher ( Fight Club , Seven , The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ) goes right for the jugular. No one does moral rot like Fincher. And with Affleck and Pike around to put a beautiful face on Mr. and Mrs. Wrong, the stage is set for diabolical fun that stings like a muthafucker.

Affleck’s Nick is a New York journalist jobbed out by the economy and forced to crawl home to Missouri, where he opens a bar with his twin sister, Margo (an indelibly vivid Carrie Coon), and goes to seed. Pike’s Amy, Nick’s socialite wife, is a trust-fund baby who’s also out of a writing career and way out of place in the Midwest.

Flynn, downsized from her trade as a writer and critic (a good one) for Entertainment Weekly , knows from the job-and-money squeeze. She structured her book as a he-said/she-said, starting on the day of the Dunnes’ fifth anniversary. It’s also the day Amy disappears amid signs of a bloody struggle at home, and Nick becomes a person of interest in the suspected murder of his missing, pregnant wife. Got it? Spoilers would kill the mystery, for those not among the more than 6 million who’ve read the book.

What you can know is that Gone Girl has the impact of a body-slam, hitting home in every scary, suspenseful, seductive particular. It’s a movie inferno with combustible performances. Affleck is terrific, undermining his good looks to suggest the soulless shallows that define Nick. For Pike, a Brit best known for supporting roles ( Pride & Prejudice , An Education ), this is a smashing, award-caliber breakthrough you’ll be talking about for years. Does she possess the role of Amy, or does the role possess her? Either way, she’s dazzling, depraved and dynamite.

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All the actors have killer moments – Tyler Perry as Nick’s shark lawyer, Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit as the cops on the case, and a stellar Neil Patrick Harris, who miraculously finds the romantic soul in a stalker perv from Amy’s past. On the tech side, Fincher vets, including cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, editor Kirk Baxter and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, artfully escalate the seething tension.

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Like the book, the movie begins with a man wanting to crack open his wife’s skull to find out, among other things, “What have we done to each other? What will we do?”

Gone Girl gives us a portrait of two vipers spitting venom at each other across the landscape of a recession-busted, morally bankrupt America. Even with Fincher’s unflinching gaze and Flynn’s incinerating wit, shards of humanity remain. Shards in which we might even see ourselves. It’s not a pretty picture.

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Review: ‘Gone Girl’ finds David Fincher at delightfully twisted best

Kenneth Turan reviews ‘Gone Girl.’ Starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, and Neil Patrick Harris. Video by Jason H. Neubert.

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Based on a whopper of a bestselling novel (more than 2 million copies moved in the first year alone), with a major star in the lead and a top-of-the line director behind the camera, the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” couldn’t be a bigger deal. Which is why you are reading this review a full week before the film’s theatrical release.

For so great has been the interest in this deliciously twisted David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as the couple from hell that reviews are appearing nationwide to coincide with its Friday night world premiere as the prestigious opening event of the New York Film Festival.

For once, however, all the fuss is justified. Superbly cast from the two at the top to the smallest speaking parts, impeccably directed by Fincher and crafted by his regular team to within an inch of its life, “Gone Girl” shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched.

Fincher, whose work can be gratuitously disturbing (“Seven”) as well as formally impressive (“The Social Network”), is by nature a chilly director, a temperament that meshes well with the unsettlingly bleak view of human nature that “Gone Girl” is all about.

Novelist and screenwriter Flynn must have been briefed by the Shadow himself about the evil that lurks in the hearts of men (and women), not to mention the lies, manipulation and self-interest that live there too. But the fact that Flynn’s subjects are essentially love, marriage and personal relationships gives “Gone Girl” a human connection that was absent in Fincher’s off-putting last work, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Sticking closely to Flynn’s dazzlingly complex plot and its cascade of surprises (there are so many that the two-hour-and-25-minute running time barely contains them), “Gone Girl” is the kind of portrait of a marriage that might have resulted if Alfred Hitchcock had watched a lot of Ingmar Bergman before getting down to work.

The setting is the depressed but imaginary Midwestern town of North Carthage, Mo., where Nick Dunne (Affleck) is introduced on July 5, also described in an on-screen title as “the morning of.”

Looking distraught and distracted, Nick heads to The Bar, a (what else but) bar he owns with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), where he throws down an early-morning shot. It’s a drink he will very soon be needing.

For when Nick returns home on this, his fifth wedding anniversary, the door is open, the living room’s glass coffee table has been reduced to fragments and his wife, Amy (Pike), is gone, gone, gone.

Quick on the scene are Det. Rhonda Boney (an excellent Kim Dickens) and Officer James Gilpin (Patrick Fugit, the star of “Almost Famous” back in the day), who methodically go about trying to figure out what happened to Amy and who might be responsible for whatever that was.

But that is only half of “Gone Girl’s” narrative. The film goes back and forth from the investigative present to extensive flashbacks of the past, snapshots that are brought to life through Amy’s voice-over reading of her very personal diary.

Back we go half a dozen years to Nick and Amy meeting in Manhattan, two glib and verbal magazine writers who fall truly, madly, deeply in love and enjoy two blissful years of marriage, doing movie things like making love in the back of a bookstore with no one around to notice. “We’re so cute,” Amy comments at one point in a typically tart Flynn line, “I want to punch us in the face.”

The voice-over also lets us know that Amy is the model for Amazing Amy, a mega-selling series of kids’ books written by her parents (David Clennon and Lisa Banes) about a character who succeeded where the real Amy often fell behind. The competition made the real Amy crazy but also left her with a healthy trust fund.

It’s at this point that reality intrudes. Both Nick and Amy lose their jobs, her trust fund takes a hit, his mother gets cancer, and the end result is that the couple move to North Carthage, Nick’s hometown and a place that total New Yorker Amy simply cannot abide.

Meanwhile, in the day-by-day present, Nick is starting to look more and more like a suspect (today’s savage media circus is one of the film’s targets), partially because his frat-boy good looks and charm don’t play well on the air.

Affleck, who’s had his own personal deer-in-the-headlights moments, gets Nick’s combination of arrogance and likability exactly right, and Pike (memorable in “An Education” and “Jack Reacher”) is completely his equal in a performance that defies expectations at every turn.

“Gone Girl’s” twisty plot wouldn’t be as effective as it is if the casting of all the subsidiary characters weren’t as good as the leads, and Laray Mayfield, who has cast Fincher’s films since 1999’s “Fight Club,” has done a superb job placing actors like Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski and Casey Wilson, as well as Coon, Dickens, Fugit, Clennon and Banes, in this intricate mosaic.

The same is true for Fincher’s veteran production team, including cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, editor Kirk Baxter, production designer Donald Graham Burt, costume designer Trish Summerville and the music and sound design team of Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross and Ren Klyce. They’ve allowed the milk of human kindness nowhere near this production, but that is the way it had to be.

Twitter: @KennethTuran

-------------------------------

‘Gone Girl’

At the New York Film Festival

MPAA rating: R, for scenes of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity and language

Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes

Playing: At New York Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall this Friday, then in general release starting Friday, Oct. 3

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Gone Girl Review

03 Oct 2014

145 minutes

David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens with a weirdly framed close-up of Amy Dunne’s (Rosamund Pike) head, while her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) muses on the often unspoken thoughts that might course through any marriage: “What are you thinking?” “How are you feeling?” “What have we done to each other?” The complex psychology and shifting dynamics of long-term relationships are just two of the engines driving Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 battle of the sexes bookbuster; others include the pernicious voyeurism of the media, the way we curate and present our personalities in the modern era and just how will Ben Affleck fit into that batsuit with that belly? The net result is, especially in its first two thirds, a cinematic equivalent of a juicy page-turner, a gripping, sharp, blissfully entertaining thriller that pushes every hot-topic button you can think of to become the must-talk-about film of the year.

It’s not hard to see why Fincher was attracted to Gone Girl. It touches base with much of his previous work: Panic Room (a key location is decked out to the rafters with surveillance equipment), Zodiac (the sense of a procedural in the information age) and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (a particularly violent bedroom encounter) are all touchstones. But more pertinently, there is a briskness and a malicious glee in telling a tale that harks back to Seven and The Game. There’s no head-in-the-box moment, just the buzz of a director delighting in leading you into some dark, dark recesses.

Flynn’s book shifts between first-person narratives told from Nick (the present) and Amy’s (the past) perspectives and Fincher’s film respects the structure. After a montage locating it squarely amid the McMansions and mailboxes of well-off America, Fincher gives us quickly sketched glimpses into Nick’s life — small talk with his sister (the excellent Carrie Coon), playing board games in his bar — before his world is turned upside down. With his wife missing, a smashed table and no apparent bloodbath, the investigation is led by the Marge Gunderson-esque Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens)

and sceptical sidekick Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit). You’d expect Fincher to be good at detective stuff — he gifts the cop pairing enough character not to feel rote, but not enough to slow things down — but he also excels at creating the hoopla around the CSI: the press conferences, the TV talk show debates, the community search, a candlelit vigil and the blurred line between culprit and celebrity.

If Nick’s tale feels like heartland for the director, the Amy side gives us a glimpse into what a David Fincher Romcom might feel like. As we meet them, the pair are at a party, people watching, joking about quinoa-ignorance (he thinks it’s a fish) and mispronouncing the lyrics to New York, New York (she sings “these bag-o-bones shoes”) before kissing in a sugar storm created by a backstreet bakery.

Early doors, Pike perfectly becomes the embodiment of Flynn’s notion of the “cool girl” — “a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping” — but finds other colours, too. “We’re so cute I could punch us in face,” Amy tells Nick, as they open fortune cookies and swap matching anniversary presents. But this is Fincher — you can’t imagine Adam Sandler chowing down on Drew Barrymore for cunnilingus — and it is not long before fissures start to appear. A recession, two job losses and a pre-nup are just the start. Only in a Fincher film would a protagonist buy a gun for Valentine’s Day.

The first act is smartly sketched, a nice balance of character stuff and intriguing set-up. But moving into the middle section, Fincher and Flynn ratchet things up to a whole new level of compelling. As the truth about Amy’s disappearance emerges, Fincher turns the screws on Nick, rattling the skeletons in his closet — there are red herrings and red panties — sending him further down the river until he lawyers up with Tanner Bolt, the “Patron Saint Of Wife Killers” (Tyler Perry gives a nice comic energy without diluting the drama).

Affleck nimbly treads a tightrope between innocent, affable man accused and disillusioned husband who could happily strangle his wife. The grand design works because it finds a centre in its star.

In the end, Gone Girl is a film about image and perception. On the broader level, it’s about how the media builds fabulations that quickly get subsumed as truth, and the fickleness of the public that will swallow whatever narrative is being sold. On a more intimate level, it is about the façades we build, the masks we wear. The impossibility of knowing those closest to us (not to mention the depiction of marriage as a bleak prison) is a prevalent theme in art house cinema. Here we get it at the centre of a mainstream, white-knuckle crowd-pleaser.

Just as the emotions are stripped back and raw, so Fincher’s work is equally unshowy. The fanboys may pine for the coffee-pot shot bravura of Panic Room or the speeded-up rowing race set-piece of The Social Network, but this is the director working without flash and thunder, confident his narrative has more than enough. Still, working with regular DP Jeff Cronenweth, he pulls out subtly arresting images — Amy floating on a lilo in a swimming pool — that speak less to flair and more to style. Gone Girl’s filmmaking M.O. is cold, controlled and clinical. It doesn’t have a hair out of place.

Yet, a couple of things don’t quite come off. When the film comes to resolve itself, its solutions don’t satisfy, the third act powering down rather than ramping up. Also, Fincher doesn’t quite nail the tone in the home stretch. In its latter stages he tries to more overtly syringe satire into the grimness (especially around Neil Patrick Harris’ ex Desi) and it doesn’t quite land. But its scalpel-like dissection of the mindset of marriage still holds sway. If love is a battlefield, Fincher’s film is a despatch from the white-hot heat of carnage. For those in a relationship, you may recognise its petty hatreds, artful manipulations and quiet despair. For those who are not, it will make you thankful to be single.

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Gone Girl (2014)

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Common sense media reviewers.

Violent, layered adaptation is dark but thrilling.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Self-deceit will lead you nowhere; everyone has se

The main characters are both complex and extremely

Self-inflicted pain; discussions of false rape all

Couples are shown having sex in different position

Frequent language includes "f--k," "a--hole," "bit

Lots of brands/products seen and mentioned, includ

Characters toss back hard liquor in times of stres

Positive Messages

Self-deceit will lead you nowhere; everyone has secrets; relationships have depths that no one outside of them could begin to guess at.

Positive Role Models

The main characters are both complex and extremely flawed. Their behavior is the opposite of exemplary. On the slim plus side, a detective sets about finding the truth, rather than easy answers. And two adult siblings are truly supportive of each other, even if they're far from perfect.

Violence & Scariness

Self-inflicted pain; discussions of false rape allegations; menacing moments with a stalker; a man shoves a woman while trying to rob her; a particularly gory scene involving a box cutter used to slash someone's neck. A man is shown roughing up a woman. The plot revolves around a missing woman; broken glass and blood are found at her home.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Couples are shown having sex in different positions. There's movement that suggests what they're doing, and, in one instance, a woman's breasts are plainly visible. A shower scene shows two people from behind (and, briefly, side-flash of the man's genitals). Fairly graphic discussions of sex.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent language includes "f--k," "a--hole," "bitch," "c--t," and more.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Lots of brands/products seen and mentioned, including Volvo, Hasbro, Velveeta, Dunkin' Donuts, CBS, Coke, iPhone, iPad, Dreyers, Dell, Kit-Kat, Aim toothpaste, Big Lots, Fritos, 7-Up, Chevy Suburban, Ford, Prius, Roku.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters toss back hard liquor in times of stress.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Gone Girl -- David Fincher 's dark but engrossing psychological thriller based on Gillian Flynn's best-selling 2012 novel -- centers on flawed, disturbing characters (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike , among others). The subject matter is as grim as it gets -- abduction, infidelity, murder, betrayal -- making it iffy for all but the oldest teens and adults, who can better process the story's complicated and often violent twists and turns. Expect plenty of swearing ("f--k," "c--t," and more), fairly graphic sex scenes (including a female character's bare breasts and a couple naked together in the shower, with the man's genitals glimpsed), some drinking, and one particularly gory scene involving a box cutter. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (33)
Kids say (44)

Based on 33 parent reviews

Intriguing and mysterious, yet sexually and violently graphic

What's the story.

On the day of his fifth wedding anniversary, bar owner Nick Dunne ( Ben Affleck ) faces a new world order: His wife, Amy ( Rosamund Pike ), has gone missing, their coffee table smashed to pieces. Cops descend upon the Dunnes' Missouri subdivision to help find her, but soon all eyes are trained on Nick, who hasn't exactly been a model husband. But Amy hasn't always been the perfect wife, either. Nick has his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) on his side and soon enlists a lawyer ( Tyler Perry ) famous for defending the indefensible. Everyone -- including Nick, who's desperate to clear his name -- wants to know: Where is Amy?

Is It Any Good?

Director David Fincher 's steady hand effortlessly guides GONE GIRL's transition from noir-ish page-turner to psychological thriller. It's a creepy, unsettling ride, testing audiences' loyalties and freaking them out a little, too, as they teeter to and fro. The book makes better work of asking salient questions about the nature of relationships; the movie amps up the source material's more tabloid-y side. It's violent, yes, but judiciously so, except for one scene that pushes boundaries -- perhaps so viewers can feel the impact, in full gruesomeness, of what humans are capable of, even if they don't appear to be.

In any case, we're riveted -- and not just because the framing and pacing and pretty much everything else about the movie are top-notch (except for the last 10 minutes, which feel tacked on), but because the leads are so compelling. Critics have long grumbled about Affleck's impenetrability. No matter who he's playing, we don't quite fully know what he's all about. But here he's totally present, and we sense his panic and confusion, anger and derision. It's quite a cocktail. But really, this is Pike's movie; in less able hands, the role of Amy, not to mention the scenery, would have been chewed to bits. Pike is precise, engaging, and perplexing. Even if you've already read the book, the film still holds your gaze.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Gone Girl 's violence . How does it compare to what you've seen in other thrillers and/or horror movies? Does the one particularly gory/bloody scene have more impact because it's different from the rest of the movie? Why or why not?

What role does sex play in the story? How is it entangled with violence? What message does that send?

Are any of the characters admirable? Are they intended to be? Who are we meant to root for/sympathize with?

If you've read Flynn's novel, what do you think of this as an adaptation? Is it faithful to the original story? If not, do the changes serve the film?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 3, 2014
On DVD or streaming : January 13, 2015
Cast : Ben Affleck , Rosamund Pike , Neil Patrick Harris
Director : David Fincher
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Gay actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Genre : Thriller
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 145 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language
Last updated : April 18, 2024

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15 Most Rewatchable Western Movies Of All Time

Every cameo in that '90s show season 2, 7 years after justice league, hollywood still can't stop insulting wonder woman, gone girl is a layered narrative experience that can be appreciated on multiple levels - with an intriguing central mystery, rounded characters, and sharp social commentary..

In Gone Girl , Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns home to discover that his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has disappeared from their Missouri home under suspicious circumstances. Despite her quiet mid-western life with Nick, Amy is no stranger to the public spotlight; as a kid in New York City, she was the inspiration for the popular children's book character "Amazing Amy," earning her a host of adoring fans (and more than one obsessed stalker). As a result, the search for Amy dominates the cable news cycle - thrusting Nick, and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon), into the national spotlight.

As frustration mounts, Nick hires notorious legal defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) to manage his case - a move that causes many to question what the grieving husband has to hide. However, while Nick might be presumed guilty in the court of public opinion, it is up to Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) to investigate the case for actual evidence that proves Dunne murdered his wife.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in 'Gone Girl'

David Fincher directs Gone Girl , which is closely based on the 2012 best-selling novel from author Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the film's screenplay). Adding to his list of successful book-to-movie adaptations ( Fight Club and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , among others), Gone Girl presents another uncompromising vision from the fan-favorite filmmaker - one that should please fans of the book, cinephiles, as well as casual moviegoers. Like prior Fincher films, Gone Girl is a layered narrative experience that can be appreciated on multiple levels - with an intriguing central mystery, rounded characters, and sharp social commentary.

Aside from some subtle changes, the fundamental Gone Girl story and most of its characters are akin to those found in the book - as are the novel's primary thematic threads. Like the source material, the movie is a thorough examination of love and marriage - as well as the challenges that couples face in times of uncertainty and struggle. Similarly, media exploitation is a major focus of Flynn's book, and Fincher relishes in the opportunity to lampoon fickle cable news culture (via talking head commentators played by Missi Pyle and Sela Ward). Nevertheless, restless moviegoers hoping for a straightforward mystery-thriller may find Gone Girl to be a stringent character study - one that prioritizes literary drama over cheap thrills from start to finish, with good reason.

Ben Affleck, Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Barnes, and Kim Dickens in 'Gone Girl'

Affleck is solid in the role of Nick - forcing the audience to vacillate between suspicion and empathy as events unfold (and secrets are revealed). To that end, Fincher juxtaposes familiar imagery (a guilty-looking husband smiling next to a poster of his missing wife) with subtle behind-closed-door moments of earnest drama to play on audience expectations - and Affleck holds up his end of the ruse. He's charming, he's suffering - relaxed but tempered, he could be a victim or a total sociopath.

Rosamund Pike is equally effective as Amy - providing a unique and unyielding exploration of the joy and pain inherent in any longterm relationship. While Affleck is the star of Gone Girl , and the focus of the film narrative, Pike's performance is the standout. Paired with Fincher's subtle manipulation of tone, Pike presents Amy as a complicated and haunting figure - one that moviegoers and critics will likely remember for a long time (not to mention during awards season).

Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in 'Gone Girl'

Both performances are slave to the messages and themes in the Gone Girl story - but even when certain moments come across as melodramatic or manipulative, it's clear Fincher is making intentional choices - in service of a larger creative vision (with meaningful payoff by the end). The same can be said for the supporting cast, which is comprised of characters that blend social cliches (example: the TV-hungry defense attorney) with relatable human drama. Even if select characters will be familiar to moviegoers, Flynn and Fincher ensure that everyone has a unique flourish and an essential part to play in the greater Gone Girl plot.

Fincher never portrays his characters in black or white - and nearly every single player in Gone Girl is depicted as a shade somewhere in between. Dickens, in particular, succeeds as both a driving force and barometer for the police investigation - guiding viewers through a minefield of allegations, assumptions, and secrets, all while playing devil's advocate. Neil Patrick Harris gets to perform against his standard TV comedy type-casting as Desi Collings - Amy's eccentric, and obsessive, former boyfriend. Sadly, while Harris does his best with the part, the film ultimately paints him in relatively shallow strokes, underserving what could have been a great platform for the actor. Perry and Coon also deliver in their roles - as Nick's attorney and twin-sister, respectively.

Missi Pyle as Ellen Abbott in 'Gone Girl'

Gone Girl is another remarkable David Fincher cinematic experience - and an inspired adaptation of Flynn's already captivating novel. The filmmaker holds little back, embracing the downright ugly side of love for a truly memorable movie viewing. Certain audiences might have trouble with the film's methodical pacing - which places a heavy emphasis on character drama instead of simply jumping from clue to clue. That said, once Gone Girl 's secrets are unveiled, and the overarching narrative becomes clear, moviegoers are in for one of the most disturbing and fascinating films of 2014.

It might not be essential for big screen-viewing but it's worth a trip to the theater - if for no other reason than to make sure interested parties can go in without expectation (and avoid being spoiled).

_____________________________________________________________

Gone Girl runs 149 minutes and is Rated R for a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language. Now playing in theaters.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our Gone Girl Spoilers Discussion .

For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check back soon for our Gone Girl episode of the SR Underground podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick to let me know what you thought of Gone Girl .

Based on Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel, Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy Dunne, a couple whose disintegrating marriage is rocked by Amy's sudden disappearance and Nick's suspected hand in it. As evidence begins to pile up against Nick, it eventually becomes clear with a shocking twist that all is not what it seems. Flynn also wrote the screenplay for the film, with David Fincher directing.

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Gone Girl Review

A MASTERFUL AND ENTHRALLING ADAPTATION

David Fincher has worn many hats over the years. He’s directed music video for some of music’s top artist, he’s produced several projects including the Netflix hit show House of Cards (Fincher directed the two episode of the series), and directed such memorable movies with films like Fight Club , Zodiac , The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the US version) and Social Network . Many of Fincher’s movies have also been nominated for awards and have won including a Golden Globe Award for Best Director for Social Network and three technical awards (Make-up, Art Direction, and Visual Effects) for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . Now, Fincher and delves into the world of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling book with the cinematic adaptation of Gone Girl . Is the film worth the hype or a hard pass?

On the day of his fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns to his house to find his wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) missing and cooperates with two local law enforcements Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Glipin (Patrick Fugit). However, the situation turns sour with the media becoming increasingly more involved with the disappearance of Amy, targeting Nick as the person responsible for killing his wife. With the help of his sister Margo (Carrie Coon), Nick, confronted with his own sins and a community that begins to loathe him, tries to decipher the clues that Amy left him for their anniversary celebration, hoping to find an answer of what happened to her. As things progress, the mystery of what really happened to Amy Dunne comes out as the story you think you know gets turned on its head and becomes the unthinkable truth.

THE GOOD / THE BAD

I will say that I haven’t the read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. So, naturally, I really can’t speak against the changes that were made with from page to screen. From what I heard (From various people) is the movie does sort take away some of the nuances from the book including make one character’s point of view kind of one sided. This may disappoint those who have read the book prior to seeing this movie. Again, I can’t speak against these changes, but author Gillian Flynn did work on the movie Gone Girl , developing the screenplay for the film. So, in a sense, Flynn does have the right frame of mind when crafting the script for the film, even though it might deviate from her source material slightly.

Given the complex nature of the book and its thematic adult undertones, David Fincher is the perfect candidate for directing Gone Girl . His well known attention to detail in his movie is showcased in this film, but perhaps a little too much. The film’s lengthy runtime is my main problem. Elongated scenes that tediously run too long are frequent, adding to the longevity of viewing the movie (which clocks a minute shy of two and half hours long). It just felt long and drawn out at times, a prime example where the intricate details of a book are preferably better within its pages rather than a film’s screenplay. There are some dark elements to the movie (a couple of scene that makes you gasp in shock), but those scenes I won’t say are uncomfortable to watch like in Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (you know what I’m talking about).

At its core, Gone Girl is about a marriage and a vile and toxic one at that. The film places a marriage under a microscope and layers it, dealing with love and romance at its inception that begins to ultimately chip away at a marital foundation with issues like unemployment, estrangement, moving, and financial problems. These are all real issues in a multitude of relationships and perhaps why many can connect to the characters of Nick and Amy Dunne. Who we are and what we do are sometimes a mask for the public eye (A façade of sorts) and behind it is the ugly bitter truth of reality. Essentially, that’s what the framework around Gone Girl’s story persist on asking, setting up viewers for a dubious mystery of duplicity.

The cast for Gone Girl is remarkable. Where to start? Ben Affleck is cast correctly as Nick Dunne, a character that you like one moment and despise the next; a kind of paradoxically effect on viewers as well as the characters in the film. While, of course, Affleck’s name lends weight to the film, the honest true star of the film is Rosamund Pike as Nick’s wife Amy. Pike delivers a spectacular and riveting performance, one that might be a career defining role for her. Many, including myself, expect to see Pike getting an “Oscar” nomination for her role in this movie (and personally I hope she wins). As for side characters, Kim Dickens is exemplary as the razor-sharp sleuth Detective Boney as well as Carrie Coon portrayal of Nick’s ethical and reasonable sister Margo. Rounding out the cast is Neil Patrick Harris as the kind-of-creepy, but even-keel demeanor Desi Collings, Amy’s ex-boyfriend and Tyler Perry delivers a small, but favorable performance as Nick’s defense attorney Tanner Bolt.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Fincher’s Gone Girl is a powerful film adaption from the book of the same name. The film examines a marriage on a treacherous downward spiral, dosing its narrative in illusions with ambiguity and deception. It’s dark, intriguing, left open for debate and much to be desired. It was, to me, a terrific film that captures Fincher’s R-rated touch of deceitful characters, coupled with stirring performances from its lead and supporting cast and an engaging narrative. Hats off to David Fincher for bring Gillian Flynn’s novel to life, treating viewers to a tantalizing feature of thrilling entertainment and learning that “Amazing Amy” vanished and (behind the façade) never really existed at all.

4.4 out of 5 (Highly Recommended)

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 3, 2014
Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne; Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne; Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings; Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt; Carrie Coon as Margo Dunne; Kim Dickens as Det. Rhonda Boney; Patrick Fugit as Officer Jim Gilpin; David Clennon as Rand Elliot; Lisa Banes as Marybeth Elliott; Missi Pyle as Ellen Abbott; Emily Ratajkowski as Andie Hardy; Casey Wilson as Noelle Hawthorne; Lola Kirke as Greta; Boyd Holbrook as Jeff; Sela Ward as Sharon Schieber

Home Release Date

January 13, 2015
David Fincher

Distributor

20th Century Fox

Movie Review

Gone Girl tells the story of a woman, Amy Dunne, who mysteriously goes missing. But it’s also the story of how her marriage to Nick Dunne went metaphorically missing years before.

The early days of Nick and Amy’s union defied the grim warnings about weddings Amy had been given: Marriage is hard work. Marriage means compromise. Marriage will kill your soul.

“Not for me and Nick,” Amy gushes in her diary on the couple’s two-year anniversary. For Nick and Amy, both of whom write for magazines in New York City, life is a never-ending fairy tale full of creativity and carnal connectivity.

Until, that is, the recession rips away first Nick’s job, then Amy’s. Next up: the news that Nick’s mother is dying back in (fictional) North Carthage, Missouri, and that they need to move back to care for her. Finally, Amy’s parents (authors themselves who used their daughter as a template for a bestselling children’s franchise dubbed Amazing Amy when she was a kid) inform her that they’re broke and need to raid her sizeable trust fund.

It’s all a “stress test,” Amy writes in her diary, that will reveal what their marriage is really made of.

Reveal it does. But not in a good way.

Positive Elements

Gone Girl can be interpreted as a parable—or maybe more accurately, as a deeply disturbing cautionary tale—about the peril of relating to others as we want them to be instead of understanding them as they are.

Amy comes to despise her husband’s weaknesses. And he, in turn, despises her attempts to remake him. There’s no grace here, no forgiveness. Unconditional love, Amy says, is impossible. And as each of them justifies his or her own self-centered positions, their marriage utterly unravels. None of that is positive. But it is possible to see Nick and Amy’s barren interactions as an illustration of how not to treat a spouse.

And it’s important to note that a lot of Amy’s identity issues stem from mistakes her parents made raising her. Growing up as the inspiration for Amazing Amy , Amy comes to deeply resent that the fictional version of her was always a perfect projection of her own obviously flawed personality. “Amazing Amy has always been one step ahead of me,” she tells Nick. That’s why she so very much loves that Nick initially accepts her, warts and all. But then, slowly, she comes to the horrifying realization that he’s actually more interested in “outwardly cool Amy” than who she really is on the inside.

Amy eventually reappears, pregnant. And Nick decides to stay with her for the sake of raising that child—the most self-sacrificial choice he ever makes. Nick’s twin sister, Margo, is loyal to her brother and is his only ally when he’s suspected of murdering his wife. She is also, rightly, frustrated that he hasn’t told her the whole truth.

Spiritual Elements

Margo says Amy likes to play God—”the Old Testament God.” We hear references to people praying for Amy’s return, including high-powered defense attorney Tanner Bolt, who says, “We prayed to God, and God answered our prayers. Amy Dunne is home.” He dubs her return “The Miracle on the Mississippi.” We hear Blue Öyster Cult’s 1976 hit “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

Sexual Content

Three sex scenes between Amy and Nick involve him giving her oral sex, as well as them having sex on a table at a public library and up against a mirror. We see explicit motions of intercourse, hear sexual sounds and see everything short of full-on nudity. Nick is also shown having sex with the young woman he’s having an affair with. Breast nudity is paired with graphic sexual movements. There’s more nudity shown as she gets dressed afterwards.

A shower scene in which Amy washes a man’s blood off briefly shows her breast and torso. She’s also shown covered by bubbly water in a bathtub. We see her in clingy negligee. Two scenes give glimpses of full-frontal male nudity. Dialogue references oral sex, sexual body parts, incest, masturbation and strippers.

While hiding, Amy has sex with a guy she used to have a relationship with, then concocts a story …

Violent Content

… about him kidnapping her, tying her up and repeatedly raping her. We see her use a wine bottle (under her nightgown) to simulate believable injuries to support her tale, and she stains her underwear with wine. But none of that comes close to what she does to her unsuspecting conquest while they’re having sex: With her graphic sexual movements continuing throughout and even afterwards, she slits his throat, killing him. (Massive quantities of blood pour from his neck onto both of them.)

Amy hits herself in the face with a hammer to bolster allegations of abuse. She bites a lover’s lip, drawing blood. To fake her own death, she draws a significant amount of her own blood, spills it on the floor, then cleans it up. In an argument, Nick throws Amy to the floor, and she hits her head hard. Another argument finds him slamming her head against a wall. Several references are made to people contemplating suicide.

Crude or Profane Language

Four uses of the c-word. Fifty-plus uses of the f-word and half a dozen s-words. “A–” and “a–hole” are used more than 10 times (combined). The same goes for “b–ch.” We hear “p—,” “h—,” “t-ts” and “p—y.” God’s name is abused a dozen times, once or twice with “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters drink alcohol (beer, wine, champagne) and smoke cigarettes. Several scenes take place in a bar. We hear references to OxyContin and the fact that North Carthage has a growing drug problem.

Other Negative Elements

Amy plots how to retrieve a pregnant woman’s urine from a toilet in order to fake a pregnancy test. A man and a woman rob Amy. Margo detests Amy, and tells her brother, “Anyone who would take her is bound to bring her back.” Amy spits in another woman’s drink.

Tanner suggests that big legal cases aren’t about what happened, but about how likeable the defendant is. “This case is about what people think about you,” he tells Nick. “They need to like you.”

Marriage, as Amy Dunne narrates, can be hard. Gone Girl takes that observation and multiplies it to infinity in a story that spins ever more wildly—and sexually and gruesomely —out of the realm of normalcy and into something more like The Twilight Zone had it been created by the makers of Saw .

After all, most of the time a woman meandering through a cold spot in her marriage doesn’t fake her own death, seduce a former lover, murder him while having sex , then show up again with a brutally and fully fleshed fictitious story about how she was kidnapped and raped.

Director David Fincher, of course, is no stranger to plumbing the depths of the human heart’s deepest darkness, having already done so in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , Se7en , Zodiac and Fight Club . Gone Girl now takes its place in that gritty, grimy group as a film that unflinchingly unpacks one deeply damaged couple’s narcissism and psychoses. The image of marriage we get in this cinematic adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel is truly grim. So grim that Time reviewer Richard Corliss wrote:

“In a property with all the killer-thriller tricks—sudden disappearance and violent death, dark motives and cunning misdirection—the true creepiness of Gone Girl is in its portrait of a marriage gone sour, curdled from its emotional and erotic liberation of courtship into a life sentence together, till death do they part. In Gone Girl , marriage is a prison, and each spouse is both jailer and inmate—perhaps even executioner, too.”

And I’ll write that this story is as macabre in its twisted blending of sex and violence as anything I’ve ever seen. Well, at least since Fincher’s last film.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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Perfect Wife Makes Gone Girl Look Like a Fairy Tale

By Eve Batey

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You’re forgiven if you think you’ve already watched a true-crime docuseries about the case in Perfect Wife. It’s the story of a beautiful blond woman who was mysteriously abducted from a Northern California town in the mid-2010s, then emerged from captivity to growing skepticism from local law enforcement. Based on that outline alone, it sounds enough like the recent series American Nightmare that a certain amount of market confusion is understandable—but it’s also incorrect.

That’s because Perfect Wife, which drops on Hulu Thursday, June 20, is a photo negative of the abduction and vindication of American Nightmare ’s Denise Huskins. Instead, it’s the story of a bizarre, yearslong deception, by a (spoiler alert!) convicted perpetrator who still insists they did nothing wrong.

Sherri Papini, then a 34-year-old mother of two, made national headlines after she vanished while out on a run near her Redding, California, home on November 2, 2016—leaving behind her cell phone, headphones, and a chunk of hair. Keith Papini, her husband, was targeted as a suspect by online sleuths, who dissected every move he made in his many media appearances. “Everybody thought I was a suspect,” he says in an interview. “But I had nothing to hide. And I certainly, at that time, did not think Sherri had anything to hide.”

Three weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, Sherri was discovered by the side of a remote road, covered in injuries and a chain around her waist. She refused to speak with police initially, but eventually said two women had taken her captive, trapped her in a small, dark room, and starved, beat, and branded her. A dispute in Spanish between the pair prompted one of the women to release her, Papini said. Her memories of her captivity were foggy, and her trauma appeared severe.

Law enforcement tried in vain to find the women, as the community worried that Sherri’s abduction was part of a larger pattern. Suspicion shifted from Keith to any pair of Latinx women you might see on the street. Reunited with her family, Sherri appeared to struggle emotionally, telling Keith at one point that “I have to live with the fact that you never found me.”

“I remember I was pleading with her,” Keith says now. “Like, ‘I did everything I could, I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’”

“She knew what she was doing in that moment. And to this day, I remember that time, and it hurts. I’ll forever remember that.”

That’s because in 2020, after years of dead ends, investigators with the FBI and the Shasta County Sheriff's Office discovered that Sherri hadn’t been abducted at all.

That shocking twist is what attracted true-crime filmmaker Erin Lee Carr ( Britney vs Spears , The Ringleader ) to the story. Carr, an executive producer on the series, suggested director Michael Beach Nichols tell the tale.

“I was immediately compelled, and shocked that I hadn’t heard about it before,” Nichols says. “There’s this huge hook—just when you hear what the story is, you’re immediately sucked in.”

The three-episode series unfolds chronologically, rewarding viewers who stick with an initial episode that appears to detail a straightforward kidnapping. Nichols admits that the approach was a gamble, saying that he wanted to “immerse the audience in what everyone was experiencing at that time, in real time.” It’s as the show continues, and we see more and more interviews with Keith—but none with Sherri—that we start to realize that things aren’t what they seem.

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In a stunning piece of interrogation room footage , we finally learn the truth. DNA discovered on Sherri’s clothing was linked to James Reyes, one of Papini’s ex-boyfriends. When investigators tracked him down, he told them that Sherri had asked him to pick her up at a staged abduction site, then to take her back to his home in Costa Mesa, hundreds of miles down the coast. She’d even asked him to help her injure herself to bolster her kidnapping claims, he said. (Reyes was not charged in connection to the crime.)

A federal agent and sheriff’s deputy reveal this to Sherri as Keith sits next to her, and we watch via a camera above. It’s a remarkable, axis-shifting moment. “She fooled him, which is a lot more understandable because it's his partner,” Nichols says. “But she also fooled law enforcement, high levels of law enforcement.”

Almost two years later, Sherri pleaded guilty to lying to a federal officer and to mail fraud (the latter related to funds she received from California Victim’s Compensation Board based on her false story), and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. When asked by a federal judge if she had been kidnapped, she answered “No.” Keith filed for divorce two days later.

“It's sad,” Keith says now. “I loved this woman. I would have done anything for her. I love our children. I was blindsided.”

According to Nichols, Keith would make self-deprecating jokes about being the “idiot husband” to the crew. “And we were just like, ‘What are you talking about? Like, who would think that their partner would lie about all of this?’”

“His whole sense of identity was tied into having this relationship with his wife, the mother of his children.” Nichols says. “If he doesn't believe in that, then all of that just crumbles. I completely understand why someone would want to fight for that, and would want to fight for the relationship and would want to believe their partner.”

In the years since, Keith has grown more clear-eyed about what he refers to as Sherri’s “craft.” But he doesn’t seem angry or resentful. In fact, there’s a comforting sense of peace to the man. More than once, he expresses concern to me that, as a NorCal resident myself (I live in San Francisco), I might have lived in fear when news of Sherri’s abduction broke.

He’s not wrong. When Sherri’s kidnapping was in the news, my husband asked me not to go for a run in Golden Gate Park—and if I must go, not to wear headphones. Keith winces when I tell him that. “The ripple effect,” he says, “I take that on.

“I think of all the people that didn’t let their kids ride bikes anymore. I just overwhelmingly…” He trails off. “I'm just so sorry.” That self-inflicted guilt is one of the main reasons he participated in the series, Keith says. “I really wanted to say thank you, for everyone coming together.”

Sherri was released from prison last fall, and has returned to the same community that searched so hard for her eight years ago. Keith, however, has no contact with her. “I don't talk to her whatsoever, with the exception if we have a court date. We’re not talking, but we’re in the same room. And she sees the kids once a month on professionally supervised visits.” A final custody arrangement has yet to be agreed upon.

Nichols says he tried every avenue he could to speak with Sherri, but she never responded. That means the motive for her deception remains a mystery. Even now, Nichols thinks Keith is still “worried that Sherri will be believed, because he believed her for six years.” When I ask how this could be, after she admitted to the hoax in court, Nichols pauses for a moment.

“Based on what we’ve heard from people that are closer to Sherri, it seems like she’s sort of sticking to her story, that she was abducted. There’s a whole story that she’s still telling.”

“I would wager that she’s not happier now than she was when this all happened,” the filmmaker adds—a notable contrast to how Keith says he feels today.

“I wanted to let the community and my friends and family members know that we’re doing great, the kids are thriving,” he says. “A lot of people will go through a lot of very crazy things in their lives. Mine was publicized, and mine was put out there. And it’s very odd and strange. But you know, I need to be there for my kids. I don’t have time to sit there and yell at everybody. And I just need to keep moving forward.”

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The Most-Watched Hulu Documentary Reveals the Bizarre Real-Life ‘Gone Girl’

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We’ve got good news for true crime enthusiasts. A new Hulu docu-series is working its way up the streaming charts. I’m talking about Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini . The series dropped on June 20th, and it’s already claiming a spot in the top ten on the Hulu charts. The series holds the #6 spot as of the drafting of this post. Not too shabby.

Sherri Papini infamously made headlines in November 2016 when she ‘disappeared’ while jogging. She shocked law enforcement and her family when she reappeared three weeks later, about 150 miles from where she had vanished. Upon her return, Papini was telling a tall tale of kidnappers and hostile demands. But law enforcement quickly began poking holes in her story. The case drew comparisons to the feature film Gone Girl and is often referred to by the media as ‘The Real-Life Gone Girl Case.’

Also Read: “Brilliant” New Netflix True Crime Documentary Series Exposes the Shocking Life of Mafia Boss John Gotti

The Hulu original docu-series recounts the shocking ordeal from the perspective of those impacted by it. Among the commentators is Sherri’s husband, Keith Papini. The filmmakers give him the chance to tell his side of the story and discuss the impact the media attention and police scrutiny had on his life.

Michael Beach Nichols directed the three-episode docu-series for Hulu. Few critics have weighed in at this juncture. But the program is a hit with viewers thus far. With more than 500 votes, the show has a 7.4/10 user rating on IMDb.

That’s all we have for you at present. Be sure to stay tuned to the site for more updates on which films and series are making waves on the streaming charts. Also, follow @DreadCentral on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter so you never miss an exciting update.

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COMMENTS

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'Gone Girl': The reviews are in
Ann Hornaday ( Washington Post ) " Gone Girl is a "yes, but" movie: Yes, it's well-made, but it stays maddeningly on its own polished surfaces. It's smart, but not clever or probing or ...
David Fincher Puts Ben Affleck's Evasiveness to Good Use in Gone Girl
Gone Girl. Oh, what a stunning opening shot—a prelude to damnation—director David Fincher serves up in his elegantly wicked suburban noir Gone Girl, adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best ...
Gone Girl Review
Gone Girl is a beautiful film in its entirety. The only thing holding it back from feeling utterly sublime is that it is well, perhaps just a bit too perfect. One craves a raw burst of passion ...
Gone Girl (2014)
Gone Girl: Directed by David Fincher. With Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry. With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.
Gone Girl (film)
Gone Girl is a 2014 American psychological thriller directed by David Fincher and written by Gillian Flynn, based on her 2012 novel of the same name.It stars Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, and Carrie Coon in her film debut. In the film, Nick Dunne (Affleck) becomes the prime suspect in the sudden disappearance of his wife, Amy (Pike) in Missouri.
Gone Girl
Ultimately what makes Gone Girl so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. The director bathes the B-movie scenario in the queasy-green hues of a morgue, while Affleck flashes his million-dollar smile like a dime-store Dracula and the beautifully inscrutable Pike absorbs the light like a wax mannequin.
Critics Consensus: Gone Girl is Certified Fresh
Gone Girl 87%. As the old promotional tagline goes, "You've read the book — now see the movie!" In the case of David Fincher's Gone Girl (adapted from Gillian Flynn's page-turning bestseller), critics say that's sage advice, for the film is a psychologically penetrating thriller that's chilling and darkly funny — and it features a performance from Rosamund Pike that's ...
'Gone Girl' Movie Review
Gone Girl is a movie of its cultural moment, an era when divorce won't cut it if there are options for lethal revenge and aggravated assault. In the toxic marriage of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck ...
Review: 'Gone Girl' finds David Fincher at delightfully twisted best
By Kenneth Turan. Sept. 25, 2014 4:34 PM PT. Los Angeles Times Film Critic. Based on a whopper of a bestselling novel (more than 2 million copies moved in the first year alone), with a major star ...
Gone Girl Review
Gone Girl's filmmaking M.O. is cold, controlled and clinical. It doesn't have a hair out of place. Yet, a couple of things don't quite come off. When the film comes to resolve itself, its ...
Gone Girl (2014)
Gone Girl (2014) This is a psychological thriller set in Missouri.The mystery surrounds a man who becomes the main suspect in the sudden disappearance of his wife. The film was praised by critics and audiences alike. It received multiple award nominations.
Gone Girl Movie Review
Parents need to know that Gone Girl-- David Fincher's dark but engrossing psychological thriller based on Gillian Flynn's best-selling 2012 novel -- centers on flawed, disturbing characters (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, among others).The subject matter is as grim as it gets -- abduction, infidelity, murder, betrayal -- making it iffy for all but the oldest teens and adults, who can ...
'Gone Girl' Review
David Fincher directs Gone Girl, which is closely based on the 2012 best-selling novel from author Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the film's screenplay).Adding to his list of successful book-to-movie adaptations (Fight Club and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others), Gone Girl presents another uncompromising vision from the fan-favorite filmmaker - one that should please fans of the ...
Gone Girl Review
David Fincher has worn many hats over the years. He's directed music video for some of music's top artist, he's produced several projects including the Netflix hit show House of Cards (Fincher directed the two episode of the series), and directed such memorable movies with films like Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the US version ...
Gone Girl
Movie Review. Gone Girl tells the story of a woman, Amy Dunne, who mysteriously goes missing. But it's also the story of how her marriage to Nick Dunne went metaphorically missing years before. The early days of Nick and Amy's union defied the grim warnings about weddings Amy had been given: Marriage is hard work.Marriage means compromise.
'Perfect Wife' Makes 'Gone Girl' Look Like a Fairy Tale
Three weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, Sherri was discovered by the side of a remote road, covered in injuries and a chain around her waist. She refused to speak with police initially, but ...
Most-Watched Hulu Documentary Reveals the Real-Life 'Gone Girl'
Sherri Papini infamously made headlines in November 2016 when she 'disappeared' while jogging. She shocked law enforcement and her family when she reappeared three weeks later, about 150 miles ...

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Reviewed at Fox Studios, Century City, Calif., Sept. 15, 2014. (In New York Film Festival — opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 149 MIN.

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