GONE GIRL REVIEW

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I read Gone Girl when I was going through this huge thriller kick one summer - inhaling all the Thomas Harris and James Patterson I could find, and completely wrecking my attention span in the process - and for a few heady days, it was all I could think about. The prose is beautiful, just lyrical enough, and there was nothing lazy in the machinations of its plot. However, if I could go back, I would have refrained from reading the little review quotes on the first few pages of my copy. They were all talking about the HUGE TWIST. I was constantly alert for this HUGE TWIST, and felt like I was David Tennant in Broadchurch, hired specifically to unspool the thread of this dark incident - to figure out the twist before it was revealed. When the HUGE TWIST came, I was just like, oh. There it is. I was mainly relieved. 

The HUGE TWIST is that Nick Dunne didn't callously murder his "New York wife", Amy; she removed herself, to teach him a lesson. We learn this halfway through the book and film. In a clumsier author's hands, this would just be rude, frankly - a cruel "it was all just a dream" tactic, for shock and not much else. The first chapter where Amy reveals her plans is one of my favourite things, not least for the "cool girl" rant that helps wash away the bitter aftertaste of Nick's casual misogyny. I was so interested to see how they handled the twist in the film, because in the book it's easier to move from narrator to narrator, our narrow focus tilted this way and that by the warring parties. 

The first half of the film, pre-twist, follows the book closely. One of the things I was most excited about was to see how Fincher captured suburbia, and he didn't disappoint: his shots all looked like something from Arcade Fire's The Suburbs album booklet, all angles, with clear, crisp colours and liquidy lighting. If The Social Network was a wash of yellow, Gone Girl is pale, soft blue, the shade of sky and lake. We follow Ben Affleck as Nick, who remains peculiarly unaffected by his wife's disappearance, moving through this landscape with the broad confidence of the popular guy in high school. Affleck is so, so good as Nick - I didn't particularly like his character in the book, but something about seeing his inappropriate grins and ridiculous remarks play out in front of you makes it hard not to like him. The whole cinema was laughing at him in a sort of fond way every time he said anything.