Critics reviews

Flynn herself adapted the book, and her screenplay displays a remarkably judicious whittling process, as well as a keen notion of what would and wouldn't play on the screen versus the page. Both she and Fincher smartly craft the film as if expecting most of the crowd to know the big second act twist going in, and that frees her to focus on the various knife twists that imbue even the most tossed-off exchanges with menace and suspicion.

Gone Girl isn't a provocation, it's playing the part of a provocation, and all the while smugly congratulating itself on its ability to commit to nothing except its own immaculate, frictionless surface.

If the first half of Gone Girl aims to create a more or less realistic atmosphere of Hitchcockian menace, the second half surrenders to a reckless, high-camp pulpiness. Amy's sociopathy functions rather as dream sequences do in other movies: it makes anything possible.

Gone Girl is [Fincher's] most precise film, if not his best, and proves that he can best any source through sheer force of will and pure cinematics... [But] it's a film without a center. Without a soul. Good as it is, slick and entertaining and provocative, it can never transcend that absence.

That's the theme of the film: just how crazy is she? And how did she get that way? Who caused it? Or was she born that way? Fincher allows enough ambiguity here that the film brings up fascinating themes of co-dependency, abuse, financial need and "likeability." Though, thriller tropes steal the air from this ambiguity to an infuriating degree.

I, for one, couldn't get past Fincher's sallow harnessing of the material's sordid cynicism, and would have enjoyed it more had it been directed by, say, John Waters, or shared more in common tonally with Eating Raoul (1982), Paul Bartel's riotously tacky satire of bourgeois coupledom.

Tragedies and thrillers, even preposterous ones, are not designed to make you laugh... The absurdity, its laughableness, is a necessary part of the film. [Gone Girl is a domestic comedy] in the classic, Shakespearean sense — it is a story that tilts and swerves, yet resolves, in the end, in marriage.

What is exceptionally clever about Gone Girl, again both novel and film, is that its second half replaces the murderous-husband schema with a revelation of Amy as a spider woman. [By asking for help from Desi Collings,] Amy re-creates the lethal-husband scenario and recruits Desi as her helper male. Of course in most such plots, the helper male rescues the woman from peril. Here she _is_ the peril.

It plays to me as a humorless artist's failed attempt at making a funny. I can't say I wasn't compelled, but many is the scene where I longed for Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma's wackadoo tonal perversity over Fincher's propulsive yet studied classicism—a roller coaster moving only and ever in a rigid straight line.

Fincher is a throwback all right, but he doesn't go much further back than the release of Pretty Hate Machine. For all of Fincher's marvelous control, I can't look past the accumulation of Nineties tropes that riddle his filmography, a particular form of PTSD that comes with having gone through adolescence in that era. It's in his ex-music video director's fetish for urban/industrial desolation. It's in his serial killer chic. It's in his marketable, unreflective conception of female agency...

This is a faultlessly speedy work, slicing and dicing scenes into their most pertinent details in quick close-ups and quicker conversations. In the many long dialogue scenes, Fincher finds a dozen or more angles that go way beyond shot-reverse shot to keep your eye constantly straining to keep up and mentally suture the fast-changing new perspectives to the consistently sped-up dialogue.

The plot seems quite trashy, with some far-fetched twists, but director David Fincher turns it into a moody, mordant showcase for some fascinating subjects. Living in a self-conscious world, as already mentioned. The war between men and women. The unspoken primacy of money in America. And, most importantly, control, a favourite Fincher theme since the days of Seven and The Game.