The stench of something very dead hangs over every frame of Gone Girl. It starts off as a James Hadley Chase-esque crime thriller, after all, and sooner or later, you reckon, a dead body, presumably of a young, attractive East Coast woman trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage in small-town America, will pop up. Particularly when the initial empathy you had for her loser husband begins to ebb, and the sharp angularities of his personality crawl out of the woodworks. His ongoing affair with his ex-student, for instance. And the financial precipice he hovers on the edge of. And the fact that he stands to benefit hugely from a recently bumped-up insurance on her life…
For over an hour, as masterly director David Fincher brings us up to speed on how sexy-smart East Coast writer-couple Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) wind up in recession-weary small-town America, we’re caught—like a rubber-necking net-side spectator at a tennis court—in the back-and-forth of irreconcilable he-said-she-said narratives on parallel strands. Fincher has us switching loyalties between Nick and Amy with every volley, with every twist in the tortured tale of a marriage gone wrong and a love that’s well and truly dead.
But above all else, and beyond the gripping whodunit outer crust, Fincher’s film, and the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn on which it is based, is at its core a wrenching tale of the viciously hurtful games that couples play within a modern marriage that’s gone careening off the rails. The ‘Amazing Amy’ character, essayed splendidly by Pike, is, of course, an over-the-top outlier in the way she manipulates perceived reality to her advantage (for which reason, feminists see an undercurrent of misogyny in the delineation of her character). But that aside, every twisted emotion in Gone Girl rings credibly true. And when Nick seeks to get into Amy’s head and wonders: “What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What have we done to each other?”, it is hard not to empathise with his incapacity to unlock the closed vaults of her mind. It is, after all, a common-enough affliction in many modern-day relationships. It is a tribute to Fincher’s craftsmanship that Gone Girl manages to dissect the modern marriage without losing its tempo as a suspenseful thriller. Even through the overpowering stench of formaldehyde, there is a whiff of freshness about it.
