Gone Girl is a satisfactory and quite interesting thriller

Rating: 8/10 (3 October 2014)

Many people adore director David Fincher, but I'm not one of them. I generally like his films, but I don't consider myself an unconditional fan of his. Gone Girl, his most recent film, is a very good addition to his filmography, because besides of having a refined style and various solid performances, it tells us a cleverly twisted and perverse story, where there aren't good or bad people, but different levels of victims. However, I found the first hour from Gone Girl a bit generic... the "husband accused of homicide" subject is kinda trite, like taken from an episode from Law and Order. But then, the twist comes, and the movie comes to life, filling itself with energy which is kept until the ending. I had previously never swallowed Ben Affleck as an actor, but I have to admit that he brings a credible performance in Gone Girl, and he's well complemented by Carrie Coon, Tyler Perry and Kim Dickens. As for Rosamund Pike, who plays the missing wife in flashbacks, her performance is irregular; she feels excessively feigned in some scenes, but in other ones, she transmits devastating levels of melancholy and hopelessness. One of the elements I appreciated the most in Gone Girl is the tense music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Or I might be saying "soundtrack", because more than "music", Reznor and Ross created "aural landscapes" with percussions, noises and electronic cadences which twitch the nerves and make us participants of the anguish and concern all the characters experiment on a higher or lower degree. In conclusion, even though the first hour feels a bit generic, Gone Girl quickly recovers itself in order to bring us an intense, satisfactory and very interesting thriller, which I consider worthy of a recommendation. Besides, from a personal point of view, Gone Girl became another subsection in the long list of reasons why I prefer to be single.