The Game of 21st century marriage

Rating: 7/10 (13 November 2014)

Sometimes it feels good to be manipulated. Gone Girl, adapted by Gillian Flynn from her bestselling 2012 novel, delights in yanking our sympathies back and forth right through its 149-minute running time. It's all about Nick (Ben Affleck) and "Amazing" Amy (Rosamund Pike), an apparently perfect marriage of creative people. One day Nick comes home to find signs of a struggle and Amy gone. He calls the police. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) kicks off an investigation that will start with a missing person, before transforming into a kidnapping and murder enquiry.
But who's murdering who? And where's the pesky body? The story of how we got to this mysterious place is told by Amy via her diary entries, and by Nick living in the aftermath. One is an unreliable narrator; the other an unreliable suspect. It's the basis for a cruel, classy morality play, with hints of Polanski nastiness and De Palma salaciousness.
The film earns its generous duration by covering a lot of genre ground. We have the domestic drama between Nick and Amy in the form of flashbacks to their crumbling marriage; police procedural; media satire; courtroom conversational; black comedy; and even horror. Fincher mostly gets the balance right. Tyler Perry's hotshot lawyer comes close to cracking a smile and breaking the mask, though I get the feeling that with further viewings the whole film may emerge as some sort of strange, dark comedy. As the satire broadens – Neil Patrick Harris is introduced as a scarily controlling obsessive who could have come from the pen of Stephen King – the humour loses some of its subtlety. But that's no different to the way The Shining winked at the start and then went postal in the final act.
The script is full of wicked wit, and is deliciously precise. The level of detail is matched in the cinematography and the meticulous performances. Director David Fincher is on low-key, efficient form – certainly none of Panic Room's virtuoso swooping, despite a late shift into domestic schlock. The look recalls The Game's uncanny pristine sheen, as does the playful nature of the narrative. Outside the Fincher-sphere, tonally it reminded me of Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects, another melodrama whose increasing silliness is directly relative to its tightening grip.
Affleck is impressive in the main male role. It's a perfect piece of casting, trading on the actor's easy access to smarm as a means of casting constant questions as to his guilt. But the movie belongs to Pike. As if throwing off the shackles of being miscast in so many movies (Jack Reacher, anyone?), she revels in the role of a girl who was a celebrity in childhood and becomes a china doll in adulthood. We get to see what lies beneath, and it isn't nearly as pretty as the façade. It's the sort of Oscar-worthy performance that'll never get the Oscar.
It might not have the mythic depth of Zodiac or the brain-scarring boldness of Seven, but in a sense this is Fincher's scariest film, set as it is now, here (kinda), in the ostensible safety of lovely homes. Given its page-turner appearance, some may argue that the film is 15 minutes too long. I'd say that's simply a matter of time management. Gone Girl is a mainstream movie with genuine thematic depth, exploring the gulf between marriage and love; the way that different crimes are treated by the image-obsessed media; feminism in the 21st century; and the nature of guilt. Few multiplex blockbusters would ask: What is murder? It climaxes with satisfying ambiguity, with an ending that will divide and inspire debate, while we recover from witnessing the birth of a very modern monster.