Fincher never ceases to amaze

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2014)

David Fincher is back into the feature film game, and he is continuing to prove that he is an absolute master of his craft. His new film, Gone Girl, based off the novel of the same name is a stupendously crafted mystery thriller. It's a devilishly clever story that keeps you guessing at every corner, laying on surprise after gruesome surprise to twist and rile your brain for two and a half hours.
Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a middle America husband whose wife suddenly goes missing from her house one morning. The neighborhood wide search for Amy Dunne begins, as well as an investigation into her appearance that starts to reveal some strange and startling clues about Amy's whereabouts. All the while all eyes are on Nick Dunne as the potential murderer of his wife, despite his constant assurance that he didn't do it. More and more questions begin to pop up as this compelling mystery unravels at a perfectly crafted pace, told in a beautifully dark tone with an icy tinge of black comedy.
Gone Girl is cruel and unforgiving in its story. It drags us through this harrowing and painfully real mystery that is packed with the typical Fincher darkness, of which he mixes in that snide and hilariously crass streak of humor. It's Fincher in near tip-top storytelling form. Gone Girl keeps you guessing all the way through. There are moments when you think you're ahead of the game and you've figured it all out, but the next moment will shoot all that down, leaving you scrambling to try and pick up the pieces.
This movie takes you on a dark and twisty roller coaster ride that is exceptionally fun from start to finish, even if two and a half hours seems a bit overlong for this story. Gone Girl certainly hits bumps and potholes along its way, but the unraveling mystery and undaunting suspense is a glue that holds the film together. At times the dialogue doesn't land the way it should, and this might be because the the film's screenwriter, Gillian Flynn, is also the author of the novel, and some of Flynn's words on the page don't translate quite as well to the screen.
A slew of good performances certainly help smooth out the dialogue though. Rosamund Pike is fantastic as Amy, one of the most complex and unpredictable characters I've seen on the screen in recent memory. Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are surprisingly great in their smaller yet still crucial roles. Hell, even Ben Affleck delivers a pretty great performance. Whether it's enough to carry the film or not is debatable, but the movie has so much else going for it already.
Then there's the finale of Gone Girl that is so brilliantly simple. The ending comes unexpectedly, delivering a dreadfully bleak final note. One that, per usual Fincher form, leaves you with an uneasy feeling in your stomach as you try to digest what you just experienced. This grim movie has the power to draw a real physical reaction, and that's saying something. It has the power to tell a truly gut wrenching story in two and a half hours, but also keep it wildly fresh and entertaining. Gone Girl is easily one of the best of the year thus far.