Gone Girl Review

Fincher builds the first hour as a competent missing-persons procedural and then detonates it: the diary is a fabrication, Amy is alive in a car with a road atlas, and the voiceover you have been trusting rewrites itself inside one monologue. Structurally it is the most audacious mainstream thriller of its decade, because the second half is not a twist to be solved but a new film operating under different rules. Rosamund Pike calibrates Amy as a performance of a performance, warm on camera and vacant off it, and the box-cutter sequence commits to an ugliness studio thrillers usually flinch from.

Ben Affleck's faintly smug blankness is exactly right casting. Jeff Cronenweth's Missouri is all overcast grey and television-lit press conference, and the Reznor score hums like an appliance. Flynn's script is sharpest satirizing morning-show morality and weakest in the Desi detour, which the plot needs mechanically more than dramatically. The ending, a marriage as mutual hostage-taking, is bleak and completely correct.