David Fincher's marriage-and-media thriller. Two and a half hours of a story turning over, and over, and over.
On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne returns home to a smashed glass table and a missing wife. Cable news arrives within hours. The town turns out for candlelight vigils. The internet finds Nick's faint smile creepy. The investigation becomes a national broadcast event.
Halfway through the film, the perspective shifts. We are inside Amy's diary, then outside it. The story turns over. It turns over again. The film is, at heart, a marriage portrait disguised as a thriller — or possibly a thriller disguised as a marriage portrait.
By 2014, David Fincher had spent two decades refining a directing approach built on dozens of takes, immaculate digital compositing, and a willingness to let a frame sit in silence for longer than is comfortable. Gone Girl is that approach applied to a piece of bestseller-list pulp fiction, and the marriage works.
Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth shoots Missouri suburbia in shades of amber and grey; Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score hums underneath like an HVAC system with a problem. The aesthetic is corporate hotel lobby — sterile, expensive, slightly wrong.
Pike — at that point known mostly for British costume drama — was the casting risk that defined the film. She has to play Amy as a series of performances given to different audiences: dutiful wife, cool girlfriend, suspicious neighbour, missing person, calculating planner. The 'cool girl' monologue, delivered as voiceover during a freeway montage, is the film's central thesis statement and Pike's best scene.
It is also the most-quoted piece of film writing of its decade, lifted from Gillian Flynn's novel and adapted by Flynn herself for the screenplay. Flynn is the rare novelist whose film adaptation is sharper than the book — and the cool-girl passage is sharper still in Pike's reading than on the page.
Reading the ending as a cynical shock-twist is the wrong reading. The ending is the film's argument: the marriage was always built on mutually agreed performance, and the performance now extends indefinitely because both parties have invested too much to admit it isn't real. Nick stays not because he loves Amy but because he can't survive socially without her. Amy stays not because she loves Nick but because she requires an audience.
It is, depending on the viewer, one of the bleakest endings of 2010s American cinema or one of the funniest. Probably both.