At the opening of Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is literally a man on the street. Standing by his trash cans in the half-light of an early morning at his gorgeous Missouri home in a T-shirt and sweatpants, he is what might be mistaken for “comfortable,” but he is painfully, powerfully ordinary. And in keeping with the title, he is about to learn that his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), is missing. Suspicious to both the authorities and the audience, Nick has lost his wife to either an act of violence he committed or an act of violence he did not commit. He is no longer ordinary; he is either a monster or a misunderstood victim of circumstance.
The story proceeds as a pair of alternating narratives: We follow Nick in the present as he describes to the investigating officers a challenging but basically good marriage, while Amy recounts in her diary, in parallel, a blissful courtship followed by increasingly dark flashes of trouble. We watch Nick tell the police and his sister things we know from peeking at Amy’s diary are not true. It begins to dawn, in fits and starts, that the Nick we saw standing in the street was not the entire Nick.
It seemed almost impossible that director David Fincher and original novelist Gillian Flynn, who wrote the adapted screenplay herself, could hang on to the 2012 book’s uncommon and disorienting structure, but they do. Seeing the film feels much like reading the book: They achieve the same gasps, the same moments of sudden and giddy understanding. They solve the problem inherent in every mystery: that it will be solved, but it cannot be until the final page, because once it is, the tension will slacken irreparably absent a series of false endings. In the film, as in the book, the opposite happens. Information is gained, sometimes in sudden gulps, but when it is, there is no deflation — only an exhilarating newness.
The story calls for such unrelenting work with mood, though, that there are times when it feels in danger of stalling to gaze at its own blue-gray color palette. Fincher loves his Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross scores, too, and while the dreamlike, woozy music in the first part of the film has just the right unnerving constancy, it seems at times to admit too little silence.