GONE GIRL – 4 and a half stars out of 5 – Verdict: a cracking missing persons thriller. Nick and Amy are a couple of New York journalists who meet at a party in 2005, get married, lose their jobs in the recession, and relocate to Missouri, where Nick and his sister Margo open a bar backed by Amy’s family wealth. Then one morning, Amy disappears from their home in suspicious circumstances. It looks like an abduction. Amy’s parents arrive, quickly followed by an army of press, and the community rallies around them. Nick is interrogated by a couple of local cops and it doesn’t take long for public sympathy to curdle into suspicion. Soon TV shock jocks are baying for Nick’s blood in a US state that has the death penalty. Having devoured Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel when it first came out I envy viewers coming to this film with no idea of the twists and turns it will take. It’s an ingenious thriller that peels back the onion layers of a marriage and asks deep questions about identity: how life obliges people to take on roles they never intended to play. The novel is told from the point of view of Nick with excerpts from Amy’s pre-abduction diary filling in details that become contradictory. Unreliable narration is difficult to translate to the screen but the script with Flynn penned herself succeeds admirably. Performances are excellent. There’s something not quite likeable about Affleck as Nick struggles to play up to public expectations as the distraught husband, but could this man have killed his wife? As an actor who has fallen in and out of public favour he’s well suited to the role. British star Pike a fragile looking blonde has worked consistently since breaking through as a Bond girl in Die Another Day, but she’s never had such an exciting part as Amy to get her teeth into. Tyler Perry better known as a maker of African-American comedies is memorable as Nick’s high-flying lawyer, and Neil Patrick Harris appears in a pivotal role. A new film by David Fincher is always an event. The director of the Social Network and Fight Club brings sophistication and a mood of menace to his work and he’s done a slick job with this clever unsettling story helped along by an eerie music score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Nick Dent.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 11:14:03 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015