Why Gone Girl is THAT Movie
You’re at a party all alone with only a bottle of beer in your hands. You scanned the crowd in the room— a crowd you can’t seemingly fit in until someone approaches you. A gorgeous guy with an endearing smile and an ever-so apparent cleft chin. He cracks a few jokes, trying to earn a chuckle or two. You strike intelligent conversations, banters you never know someone was able to sustain with until you met him. A small-town Midwesterner who’s trying to settle in the Big Apple.
What’s a guy like him trying to woo a poised, high-class Manhattanite like you?
You wondered but you can feel the sparks, growing so intensely. The both of you get out from that stuffy room and he takes you on a casual stroll to a bakery. You can smell the whiff of crackling sugar in the air. As you lean back on the wall, your grin etching from ear to ear, the powdered sugar fluttering around you like the finest snowflakes you have ever seen, his rough fingers graze your lips feather-light. He’s gentle. And he leans in. A perfect first kiss. A perfect couple by design.
But what happens after the sweet, succulent honeymoon phase? You both lost your jobs, he sleazes, he cheats, and you frame your husband for your own murder. Gone Girl isn’t your typical love story of how two opposites attract. It’s an unsettling tale of how a destructive marriage has decayed to its sour roots. Adapted from a best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn with the same title, A-list director David Fincher paints a nuanced picture of two complex characters — played by the suave Ben Affleck and the spellbinding Rosamund Pike — as well as their abusive relationship together.
The movie opens with a gory description of Nick (Affleck) describing the head of his wife, Amy (Pike).
“When I think of my wife, I picture her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers. The primal question of any marriage: what are you thinking, how are you feeling, what have we done to each other?”
narrates Nick as he caresses his wife’s hair and Amy looks up, visibly scared and small. The movie carries its introduction with a mysterious air, prompting you to watch further. You want to know what happened and most importantly, you want to know the husband’s motive behind his disturbing opening line.
The scene cuts to a tour of the empty neighborhood that is color-graded in shades of dull grey from the aftermath of a recession along with an unnerving score playing in the background that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Fast forward, we realized that it’s Nick and Amy’s fifth anniversary. As part of their tradition, Amy sets up clues for their annual treasure hunt in which Nick has to solve to get a prize in the end. However, when he comes back home, he finds his wife missing and a messy house — the glass of the coffee table shattered on the carpet, furniture all knocked over, indicating a possible abduction.
Like any logical husband or rather a person, he phones the police but as the movie slowly unravels itself, we see hard evidence of carelessly cleaned blood splatters in the kitchen, financial troubles, domestic disputes, and his wife’s diary, which details her increasing fear of her husband who is going to murder her one day. Not to mention, we are later introduced to Andie, a young, perky student of Nick’s and we learned that he has been committing adultery all this while.
All of this leads to Nick being the most hated man in the community and it is not hard to see why. However, as the public begins to believe Nick is the culprit behind a gruesome murder of an adoring woman, Nick, from time to time, asserts that he did not kill his wife even though he has minimal to no knowledge of her personal information — he doesn’t know what his wife is doing when he leaves the house, he doesn’t know his wife is best friends with the neighbor he thought she hated and surprisingly, he doesn’t know her blood type.
This begs the question — did Nick really kill his wife? Throughout the movie, we’re introduced to flashbacks of Nick and Amy’s lives in brighter colors. Nick presents himself as the charming, salt of the earth guy while Amy is the pleasant girl next door. Little did the viewers know that they were both pretending to be the idea of each other. During the climax of the movie, we finally meet Amy — alive and well — but far from the sweet, innocent image that we were told in the beginning.
As an elaborate attempt to get back at her husband for cheating, Amy meticulously plans her own murder. This is when the story starts to pace itself to the south. In the enchanting ‘Cool Girl’ monologue that will go down in history as a cult classic, we see another side of the story. We are brought back to Amy staging a house abduction — pushing furniture, carefully placing items in a particular spot. She splashes her blood all over the kitchen and haphazardly cleans it as she suspects her husband would.
She befriends a pregnant neighbor and fills her in with fake accounts of Nick’s vicious temper all the while stealing her urine to fake her own pregnancy. At last, she fashioned a long-standing diary that, though was accurate in its early entries, quickly evolved into fake writings of spousal violence. Amy hopes Nick would receive a death sentence for her murder. After his conviction, she would drown herself in an ocean with sleeping pills and other women who had been used by men like Nick.
Perhaps what made this movie a league of its own was how Amy Dunne was written. It depicts the narrative that the sunniest girl you know can harbor the darkest intent. Though cunningly satanic, Amy is a character that is still strangely relatable to many women who had been stripped bare by their families, husbands, boyfriends, and society. We learned that Amy was forced to embody tedious female stereotypes. Having her childhood plagiarized as a best-selling children’s book written by her mother while dealing with not only her husband’s unfaithful way but his refusal to work, Amy has no other choice but to twist the oppressive force in order to get her way.
In other words, you can say she is trying to reclaim what was taken from her — identity, money, pride, and dignity. In Amy’s viewpoint, although she is breathing in person, she is murdered at heart. She has nothing of herself left and in a fit of rage, she decides to not let a man like Nick get away with what he had done. Whilst this is no justification for fabricating murder, you can’t help but sympathize with her, especially when Amy is a forthright exemplar of the things women go through every day.
Gone Girl is far from a humdrum movie. It’s a teeth-sinking story with conniving characters and unreliable, thoughtful storytelling that leaves you room to actually ponder upon instead of having it written down for you. The moody swatches as well as the eerie music throughout the movie are a perfect fit for the dark tones of the film. David Fincher, who has a reputation for lackluster portrayals of female characters in his past films, outdone himself with how he frames Amy Dunne — fascinating and intricate.
Rosamund Pike is one of the greatest highlights in this movie with her mother killer performance as Amy. Her angelic facade and deep, sultry voice make her a perfect fit for the femme fatale. She truly shines in this deliciously devilish role. It’s hard to find a mystery thriller that is so sharply attuned and consistent with its first half as it is with its second half. It’s vile; it’s thrilling; it gets incredibly dark. But oh, is it so much fun.
There is truly nothing else quite like Gone Girl. It really is quite literally THAT movie.
