The movie adaptation of Gone Girl opens with the lines: “Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy?” This subtext of violence, duplicity and ambiguity pervades not just the misbegotten marriage of Amy and Nick Dunne, but David Fincher’s gripping psychological thriller.
A twisted pot-boiler, with an underlying stench of bunny-boiler, the film stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy, two magazine writers who lose their jobs in the recession in New York, and on their fifth wedding anniversary find themselves living in a soulless McMansion in Nick’s down-at-heel home town in Missouri. Nick returns home from an early-morning bourbon, and finds