Gone Girl

IndieWire

Director David Fincher once again invites viewers into his signature universe with Gone Girl. He, along with his actors, create one of the year's most immersive motion pictures, exploring such themes as commitment, betrayal, instability, and even media saturation. In Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) becomes the subject to a barrage of murder accusations following the disappearance of his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) on the couple's fifth wedding anniversary.

Like any marriage gone wrong, Nick and Amy's started on the highest of highs, only to be brought down by overexposure to each other, a lack of effort, the recession, lost jobs, and a move from NYC to Nick's hometown in Missouri. While Nick opens up a bar with his twin sister Margo and teaches as a professor to make ends meet, Amy stays home, mostly keeping to herself. Nick's distant and erratic behavior begins to disturb Amy, and she starts to fear for her safety being under the same roof as her husband.

Nick is adamant about his innocence in his wife's disappearance, but news coverage from the media convinces the entire country that Nick a sociopath who killed his wife. The cops hesitate to believe Nick as well, and soon, almost everyone is calling for his arrest. The only ones who seems to believe Nick are Margo, his college-aged mistress Andie, and his lawyer (Tyler Perry). Nick looks for answers as to what happened to his wife, even checking in on Amy's ex-boyfriend Desi (Neil Patrick Harris, in an impressively dramatic turn for the actor).

In an unexpected move, the story reveals what the circumstances surrounding Amy's disappearance relatively early, a decision I was at first skeptical about. However, the story went in an interesting direction from that point, emerging from a mystery film to a psychological thriller. There was a hair-raising moment every time you began to realize the pacing was a bit slow, ranging from a scene where detectives find out Amy planned to purchase a gun for her safety to a scene involving a bed, a box cutter, and quite a lot of blood.

Had the filmmakers been more fearless, Gone Girl would have been even higher on the list of the most disturbing films of recent years than it already is. Rosamund Pike was intimidatingly stoic in the moments showing Amy's collected state of insanity, but the actress fell short in the moments when she should've delivered a more impending and haunting performance. Affleck's performance is one of the main reasons to go see the film, as it's arguably the actor-director-producer's best on-screen work yet.

Fincher directs movies that are rife with subtlety (with the exception of Fight Club), and this subtlety has always been a bit too strong for my liking. I applaud the filmmaker for constructing the movie in a thought-provoking manner, but I always felt like his stories could be even more immersive than they already are. In other words, sometimes I like my movies with a bit of substance with its style. Gone Girl had both, as well as strong characters and an extraordinarily unsettling atmosphere, but the pacing and heavily dialogue-driven plot could have been approached differently. At the end, though, it's all worth it, and Gone Girl is one brilliantly twisted movie that fills its two and a half hour run time effectively.

Rating: 4/5