Gone Girl: A Potent Portrait of Suspicion

David Fincher's Gone Girl, an adaptation of Gillian Flynn's critically acclaimed novel of the same name, feels like several consecutive short stories about Nick and Amy Dunne's past being strung together to form a bigger picture of their future. It's an approach that works far more often than it doesn't, and it works mainly because Fincher has crafted a thriller so intelligently sinister it might very well make you sick to your stomach. From the outside, Nick and Amy's marriage looks to be the stuff of storybooks. Even if Nick lost his job as a writer, he's still got a beautiful wife waiting at home for him, right? Right? Then, it's the shattered glass coffee table, the blood stains on the hardwood floor, and the media breathing down his neck. The only thing it isn't is Amy. She's disappeared without a trace, and adding grave insult to Nick's relational and emotional injury is the media's sudden obsession with the juicy idea that he's somehow responsible. But is he? And if not, who is? Gone Girl wraps everything up neatly, but far from nicely. It is a stomach-churning rollercoaster of suspicion, deception, and manipulation. It is sickening, yet rarely gory. Blood is thick, but duplicity runs deeper.

Gone Girl is a rollercoaster of a thriller that's both very fun to watch and look at. The color grade of this movie is spectacular, at times straight out of a wall calendar of Midwestern America. Small towns are cast in eerie, pale shades of blue and yellow like some half-remembered dream, or partially-forgotten nightmare. This is a mysterious movie with a mysterious atmosphere, and it sucked me in from the very first frame with a lingering yet weirdly beautiful danger that's both hard to look away and walk away from. Gone Girl is a superb modern mystery, and like any great mystery, it gave me trust issues. Deception hangs over this movie like a dark cloud, and I couldn't help but feel like this movie was trying to manipulate me into feeling a certain way about Nick - in a good way. It plays its hand very close to the chest, and the mystery stays mysterious in a way that will keep you watching for answers. Nick is the main protagonist of the movie, though by no means a hero, and it feels as though the world is out to get him in spite of his predicament, despite a level of past untrustworthiness on his part. His complicated past with Amy and his seemingly fundamental predicament without her create something important: doubt.

Gone Girl is a movie predicated on doubt and deception, and its twists are fittingly insane. They're mostly well-executed, too, alongside being unpredictable and ruthlessly blunt. For once, I would almost encourage you to go into this movie with preconceptions about it, simply so that you can be floored when it doesn't go the way you think it will. Some of Gone Girl can be frustratingly exposition-heavy, yet its reveals remain mind-blowing and stomach-churningly sinister. Your jaw may drop. Mine certainly did. This movie is upsetting in the best way possible. Its priorities are also in line. Gone Girl smartly focuses mainly on Nick's attempts to clear his name rather than his investigations into the disappearance of his wife, whose fate is revealed in dramatic and subversive fashion. Granted, this movie's scale is large, and while it may have worked even better than it did as a miniseries, it plays a far-flung hand with startling efficiency, even if the card deck of an intimate character drama with much of the continental United States as its backdrop is stacked against it. The character dynamics of this movie evolve into something disgustingly ironic with enough time and deception, and I wouldn't call this movie an easy watch by any metric. Dire warning might be a better adjective.

I'll try to keep the next section as spoiler-free as possible, but I've observed a strange online phenomenon that I need to address in this review. The internet is an odd place, and I think that one of the oddest things I've seen on it is one subculture in particular - comprised of young men - that praises the homicidal Patrick Bateman of American Psycho as the aspirational image of masculinity. I bring this up to make a comparison to a similar - albeit smaller - subculture of young women praising Amy Dunne, who is a far darker figure than the label of "kidnapping victim" may make immediately apparent. Bateman's camp sees him as the spitting image of male dominance, while Dunne's proponents see her as a statement of defiant feminism in the face of male subjugation. In my opinion, neither view is healthy. Something is wrong with our culture when characters designed to critique us as the audience are instead welcomed with open arms as mascots of a movement. It's cultural self-parody, more than a little ironic. I fear that something within us is unwilling to address our darker instincts, content instead to justify any character that takes our beliefs to their logical extremes. I'm not here to make excuses for any character who might be critiquing me. I'd encourage you instead to do what I do, to let a well-made movie designed to make you feel uncomfortable do just that.

I've seen many a thriller in my time. Yet rarely has one ever turned my stomach like Gone Girl did. Yes, this movie can be shocking. Yes, it can even be bloody, if sparingly so. And yet, what makes it truly difficult to digest is how ruthlessly it manipulates both its characters and the viewer. It twists and turns like a serpent wrapped around the arm of the corporate media, and its bite is unmistakably potent and precise. This is a wonderful movie about terrible people, and when the puzzle fell into place and I could see the bigger picture, I almost couldn't bear to watch, though there was no way under Heaven I was going to look away. This movie made me wonder how many people we perceive as terrible have actually been unfairly portrayed by the media, for whatever that real-world implication is worth. Gone Girl is a gut punch you can predict but never really see coming in a house of mirrors, yet it's also a thoughtful gut punch. This is an excellent movie, and it's been hard for me to determine thus far whether it's better felt or thought about.

Gone Girl - 9/10

Malachi 2:16-17