Review: Gone Girl
Spoiler Alert: mild spoilers of the 2014 film Gone Girl lie ahead.
This might sound counter-intuitive to any readers who have actually watched the film, but I find David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller Gone Girl oddly soothing to watch.
Adapted from Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel, the film is perhaps the pinnacle (for me at least) of the domestic romance/thriller genre, besting even perennial favourites like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction.
Telling the story of the once happy newlyweds (apparently, according to our semi-reliable narrator), Nick (a perfectly cast Ben Affleck) and Amy (a devilishly haunting Rosamund Pike), Fincher brings his usual precision and visual lusciousness to the film. It serves to reinforce the calculating and altogether pathological precision of its characters, creating a world at once familiar in its domestic mundanity but chillingly extreme in its level of sociopathy and viciousness.
The story hinges on a massive twist who’s specifics I won’t spoil here, other than to say that on first watch, the moment everything changes is truly exhilarating. No longer sure of any of the plot or indeed characters who have been so methodically introduced in the film’s first half, you, as a viewer, are left only to marvel at the sophistication of the plan unravelling before your eyes.
Just when you think it can’t get any more absurdly messed-up, Fincher takes it up a notch with a series of events that have to be seen to be believed. While an obvious exaggeration (Fincher has said he was reaching for satire), the depiction of domestic capitulation and emotional distance may well sit too close to home for many viewers.
The subject of fierce feminist debate and even backlash in some quarters at the time of both the book and film’s release, Flynn has since said that she felt it important for women to be depicted just as fully (even in their misdeeds) as cinema’s great leading men. If that’s the test, she and Fincher certainly meet the brief, but with care not to let either protagonist off the hook.
Gone Girl confuses the relatively straight-forward (and in many respects well overdue) lines we have drawn in recent years as a society around gender relations. There are no simple villains or heroes in this film, with Fincher even zeroing in on the way in which usually legitimate claims of abuse can, in some rare or extreme circumstances serve as cover for more malicious actions. The fact that Flynn, in writing the novel and adapting it for the screen, chooses to complicate that straightforward narrative of the victimised woman, taking its inverse to an absurd extent, has earnt her plenty of criticism, but, in my mind, does much to render it a valuable contribution. It is always good to question shibboleths of all kinds, even those on which we on the whole agree.
Gone Girl will leave you reeling, but perhaps more importantly, thinking long after its stunning final shots.