Gone Girl


Tonight, after weeks of avoiding inadvertent plot revelations, I finally got to the cinema to see Gone Girl, the latest David Fincher film. We hired a babysitter, we went out for the night together, to a film that could hardly be described as a date movie.

Like The Social Network, Trent Reznor supplied the soundtrack, though to my ears it sounded as though David Fincher had recycled his previous film’s score: or does that just mean all techno-industrial music sounds the same to me?

My wife didn’t like it. She laughed a lot (for a film with such monstrous goings-on, it’s surprisingly light hearted) but she still felt dirtied by the whole thing. I seem to have made a habit of taking her to films that she later gets angry at me for (such as Edge Of Darkness), although by now id have thought she’d realise I don’t actually commission the screenplays, direct the actors or construct the sets. But I do buy the tickets, which makes me complicit.

It’s a long, long film: almost three hours, and I’d read that the ending is different to the book, so I was waiting for a final climactic twist that never really arrived, and left me wondering how the book ended.

I can’t say more than that for fear of spoiling the surprises for somebody else. Rest assured, despite the unreliable narrators and the tricks it plays with memory and appearance, the final act appearance of the giant mecha-Ben Affleck with enormous revolving chainsaw hands is every bit as good as you’d expect.


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