Gone Girl

15 Oct Gone Girl

Having read the novel of this about a year ago, I have been long anticipating the cinema release of this film. The original plot had intrigued me – the story of a man called Nick, whose wife Amy goes missing on the day of their 5th wedding anniversary in very suspicious circumstances. Gradually the media, the police and the rest of the world become convinced that Nick has secretly done away with his wife, and then claimed she had gone missing. The story is told partly through Nick’s eyes in the days following and including Amy’s disappearance, and partly through Amy’s diary entries tracking the early days of their dating and continuing into the years of their increasingly failing marriage leading up to her disappearance.

I went in with a sceptical mindset- the novel relies heavily on first person narrative from two completely different but both crucially important points of view, and I was not in any way convinced that a film could truly convey the highly crucial thought tracks of two characters equally.

I was wrong. This film told the story of Nick and Amy’s fascinatingly dysfunctional marriage perfectly. The narrative took the audience through Nick’s experiences of dealing with the ever increasing scrutiny from the police, the press and even his own sister in a way that created empathy, but also suspicion of to what extent we could trust his outlook. Amy’s diary entry flashbacks were interjected at all the right moments, and the use of her voiceover meant that the audience was perfectly able to understand and interpret how things looked from her side. To be able to invite the audience to sometimes empathise with and sometimes despise both of these characters at different points truly demonstrated the skill of the director and the actors, and I applaud them for this.

I cannot say much more than this without running the risk of spoilers, the story is full of so many twists and complications that to go beyond the initial plot set up would be to ruin its tantalising effects. Let’s just leave it at you must go and see this, and you must be prepared to come out thinking about it for weeks afterwards.