David Fincher Firing On All Cylinders.

Rating: 10/10 (7 October 2014)

With a director like David Fincher, you can expect a few things. The man has a speciality for creating extremely effective thrillers, and he's also very good at adapting and being faithful to source material such as 2011's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". "Gone Girl" is a best-selling novel from 2012, written by Gillian Flynn (Who also wrote the screenplay, and stated that it deviates from the novel). I can confidently say it has been a long time since I've gone to the theatre and been captivated by an entire movie. Sure there has been some stellar pictures out this year, but to actually sit down and be absorbed into a 2 hour 30 minute film and want more from it by the end is very impressive (Considering a majority of the year's biggest movies appear during awards season).
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) seem to be the ideal couple. From humble beginnings to a whirlwind engagement, at face value no one could doubt how flawless a couple they seem. Eventually on the day of their fifth anniversary, Amy goes missing. Nick calls the police who do their duty, yet after studying the apparent home invasion remain suspicious. Her disappearance creates a media frenzy turned witch-hunt, and Nick's behaviour and surfacing lies surrounding the marriage are interpreted by the media and public as characteristics of a sociopath. Did Nick kill his wife? And just where is Amy?
Two words easily sum up "Gone Girl" for me, Riveting and Haunting. American suburbia is turned upside down, and the many clues left behind for Nick become more engrossing as he remains one-step ahead of the everyone. Nick and Amy are the kind of characters that will jettison an actor into a household name. Ben Affleck continues to do extremely solid work these past couple of years, and with that said this is easily Rosamund Pike's finest hour and if there's any justice she is easily going to win acclaim for her performance. It's good to see Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry leave comedy behind once in a while, because if this is the result then I was also wonderfully engrossed. Finally Kim Dickens, Missi Pyle and the screen debut of Carrie Coon complete this casting jigsaw puzzle. David Fincher always gets the most out of his cast (According to producer Ceán Chaffin, Fincher took on average as many as 50 takes for each scene), and everyone just feels natural.
What is left to say is that the music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is fantastic, and Fincher's camera work is as sublime as ever. Shadows and light help blur how events unfold, many shots look good enough to go on a postcard and the way how your support and opinion of a character can change as the movie progresses baffles me how they pulled it off this well. Even though the finale may be a big turnoff for some people, it ends ambiguously enough to never set the future in stone and doesn't betray such an impressive atmosphere the film has continuously grown from the beginning.
Final Verdict: I really liked it, and I don't how I could make that fact more clearer. Gillian Flynn does justice to her work, and the result is probably one of 2014's best thrillers AND could possibly be my favourite film of the year so far. It's always great to see a David Fincher movie be so familiar and so well crafted to the level we've come to expect from him. 10/10.