Gone Girl (2014)
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Carrie Coon, Tyler Perry, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Missi Pyle
Directed by: David Fincher
Rating: 
It's always a bit nerve-wracking, going to see a film of a book you really enjoyed. I was utterly gripped by Gillian Flynn's cruel, cynical psychological page-turner, as beloved of books clubs as We Need to Talk About Kevin or The Lovely Bones. But would David Fincher's take on Gone Girl be a breath-taking cinematic tour de force like the former or a soggy, sentimental mess like the latter?
Well, boy is Fincher determined to make the experience as nail-biting as possible. Not because he's trashed the book – far from it – but because he brings it so bitterly and compellingly to life.
First up, the casting is spot on. With his two-day stubble and air of cuteness gone to seed, Ben Affleck could not be more perfect as the shifty, selfish husband, Nick, who finds himself catapulted into the heart of a media storm when his beautiful, talented wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. Rosamund Pike, finallly bagging a role worthy of her talents, is similarly excellent as the gone girl herself, her glacial blonde beauty concealing a torturous labyrinthine logic. For their relationship, we quickly discover, may have started out as a dream romance, but the perfect façade soon cracked and crumbled, leaking toxic poison into their lives.
Did Nick kill 'Amazing Amy'? Certainly it starts to seem that way, and in the world of Gone Girl, appearances are everything. Like a twisted, existential nightmare, it preaches that what matters most, both in private and in the world at large, is how we act and how we seem, not who we really are or what we do. As the plot twists and turns on a dime, Nick finds himself convicted of his wife's murder not in a court of law but in the kangaroo court of public opinion, mob mentality fuelled by a vicious, judgmental media. Evidence is irrelevant: if he looks guilty (and, with his dead-eyed stare and spoilt kid smirk, no-one seems guiltier than Affleck in this movie) then it's death by Facebook lynch mob.
It you've not read the book, far be it for me to spoil the story for you. Let's just say that, even knowing what was in store, I still gasped audibly at least twice. Great performances all round, a tight script by Gillian Flynn and another stomach-roiling, ambient soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross make this taut, screwed up thriller if possible even more edge-of-seat enthralling on screen than on the page, never once flagging throughout its two-and-a-half hour running time. Go see.