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Review: Gone Girl

★★★★☆
Four Stars

There is a scene in David Fincher’s latest movie, Gone Girl, that will make you spit out your popcorn, nachos, or whatever other high-calorie comfort food is typical of your soft, bourgeois life. Thanks to Fincher’s habit of making very long films, by the time this scene comes around you will have spent a good two hours wondering if, perhaps just this once, he has chosen subject matter that doesn’t live up to his usual gritty standard. Then a bottle of wine, an attempted rape and a pair of box cutters are thrown into the mix and you remember that this man’s mind produced the likes of Se7en and Fight Club, and wonder how you could have been lulled, once again, into such a false sense of security.

This scene is a good litmus test when it comes to the tone of the whole movie. Gone Girl, as the title suggests, begins as a movie ostensibly about an apparently normal middle-class Missouri couple played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, until the latter goes missing, leaving nothing but signs of a violent struggle which all point to her husband as her killer. It’s hard to say more without giving any of the numerous twists and revelations away, but as anyone who has read the original source material will know (the book is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel of the same name), very little is as it seems.

Fincher is lucky in that the material he’s working with is rich. In Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, he has two reliable and experienced actors who bring multifaceted characters to life with almost disturbing ease. When Affleck’s character, Nick, appears initially not to care about his wife’s disappearance, one can’t help but partially join in with the baying media who all scream “He did it!” Happily, too, the eponymous girl is hardly gone for most of the film thanks to flashbacks looking at the breakdown of her marriage and eventual vanishing. Pike gives what turns from a standard performance as a perfect trophy wife and all-American poster girl into a far less sympathetic, calculating survivor, and makes the viewer wonderfully uneasy during every one of her scenes. These performances couple perfectly with Trent Reznor’s delightfully chilling soundtrack. Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, brings the same industrial, pulsing beat to the film that he did on previous Fincher collaborations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, with the ever-present ambience going from ponderous to terrifying in a matter of seconds. 

The movie is too slow-paced at the beginning. Whilst Fincher does well to set up the illusion of a happy marriage, a good twenty to thirty minutes could be cut from the beginning of Gone Girl with little loss of quality. The director does up to fifty takes when shooting a scene, and the obvious perfectionism means much is included that needn’t be. The dialogue also suffers from some sort of buddy-cop syndrome; every character is cynical in the extreme, and they all talk to one another like they’re starring in a police procedural. Of course, in the case of the cop characters this makes sense (they are starring in a police procedural), but when Nick’s sister tells him early in the movie to go home and “fuck his wife’s brains out” with a totally straight face, you wish that there could be at least someone around who doesn’t speak with total snark by default.

Ultimately, the flaws in the movie are disguised by layer upon layer of intrigue. The message that no-one really knows anyone around them until placed in an extreme situation is an old one, but this is no mindless rehashing of the likes of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible or even Fincher’s own Dragon Tattoo, even where comparisons with the sexual violence of either film are valid. Instead, Gone Girl builds at a steady, even pace before exploding into a disturbing look at human psychology and the dynamics of power and manipulation. It is David Fincher at his fucked-up best.

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