#177: Gone Girl

Release Date: October 3rd, 2014

Format: Blu-ray

Written by: Gillian Flynn

Directed by: David Fincher

3 Stars

David Fincher is an unmistakable auteur. His visual palette, his tones, his actors’ performances, the very flavor of his films are, for lack of a better word, Fincherian. 

I’m a fan, and he’s made a few of my favorite films, namely The Game (1997), Zodiac (2007), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and most recently, The Killer (2023). 

But he’s not a writer, and therein lies a dilemma. 

With a director so forceful of will, so bound to his own artistic approach, his movies, I suppose, can only be as good as his taste in screenplays.

As a celebrated and profitable director, he gets to cherrypick scripts from some of the best writers in the industry (right now he’s directing a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from a screenplay by Tarantino), but just because it’s a great script doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s tailored to Fincher’s distinct sensibilities.

Gone Girl’s script, by Gillian Flynn (adapting her own novel), works okay in the Fincherian universe. She seems to have a cold view of humanity, which fits right in. Her main character, Amy, is a psychopath who manipulates a male-dominated world to get exactly what she wants. I loved her portrayal, by Rosamund Pike. I’ve only ever seen her in this and Saltburn (2023) and she’s been excellent in both. Ben Affleck is good too, as her not-smart-enough husband, Nick. 

But while watching Gone Girl tonight, to borrow a phrase from comedian Kevin Nealon, I was whelmed…but not overly. 

But why? Flynn seems to be a natural choice for Fincher, tonally and artistically. It should work better.

Maybe it’s too much of a single note, a bit monotonous, maybe? I wanted it to hit me more.

Not that there aren’t moments. Check out the scene where Amy has sex with an obsessive prep school ex-boyfriend and slits his throat in bed, spilling pints of blood all over herself and the satin sheets. It’s purely mesmerizing, and Fincher at his absolute best.

But as a whole, I think Gone Girl will end up burrowing itself into the median of Fincher’s filmographic legacy. It’s a competently executed thriller that seems like it should be better.