Amy’s diaries tell another story, in which our (un?)reliable narrator is increasingly terrorised by Nick, whom she no longer recognises as the man she married. Tellingly, Amy is already a quasi-fictional character, immortalised (and perversely idealised) in her mother’s bestselling Amazing Amy children’s books, a fairytale alter ego that still stalks its host in adulthood. Everything is a performance, everyone pretending to be something they are not, editing and rewriting themselves for the public – and for one another.
Just as The Game found Sean Penn setting elaborate role-playing traps for Michael Douglas, so the main characters here all adopt and discard projected personae, their true selves hidden beneath layers of unravelling deceit. Part putative murder mystery, part cynically sexy social satire, Gone Girl opens with Nick wondering: “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?”, and then spends most of its lengthy running time gleefully refusing to answer any of those questions. Gone Girl star Ben Affleck: ‘Usually the protagonist is full of shit’ - video interview Guardian Within days, the realignment of Nick’s “smiling sociopath” public image becomes more pressing than the search for his gone girl wife, whose own voice is heard through the pages of an incriminating diary, which reveals an alternative reading of their apparently idyllic marriage. Evidence of financial troubles and domestic disputes turns the finger of suspicion toward Nick, whose uncertain displays of grief are deemed insufficient in an age of social media and rolling news. Arriving at the scene, detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens, with a touch of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson) senses that all is not as it seems. On the day of his fifth wedding anniversary, bar owner Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) finds his Missouri home theatrically violated the front door open a glass table overturned and smashed his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), unaccountably missing. Now, with this grippingly caustic adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bifurcated novel (which the author has brilliantly adapted and reconfigured for the screen), Fincher is back on form, mixing the forensic procedure of Zodiac with the playful high-gloss sheen of The Game to ingeniously wrong-foot the audience, leading them on a merry dance of death through the murderous maze of modern marriage. T he last time David Fincher took a stab at a bestselling potboiler with an enigmatic femme fatale, the disappointing result was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an eye-catchingly stylish but thematically empty (and, frankly, unnecessary) English-language remake of an entirely serviceable Danish/Swedish hit.
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