Warning: Spoilers Ahead.
Synopsis
Based on the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2014), directed by David Fincher, is an upper-middle class woman’s revenge fantasy. Rosamund Pike plays Amy, a woman that falls prey to the heteronormative and one-dimensional stereotype of a housewife. Like many who came before her, she thinks that her relationship with her husband, played by Ben Affleck, is the fairytale romance she has always been waiting for.
Now Amy is missing. Gone. And the whole world is looking at her husband Nick Dunn for answers. Nick is on ice so thin it could crack any second, plunging him into the drowning waters of the judicial system. Everyone is just waiting for him to slip up and expose his crime (which may have been a bit true for Matt Damon for a minute there at the height of the #MeToo movement).
Ganga’s View
*warning – spoilers ahead*
I am a sucker for a good woman-centered revenge thriller, and the best ones are always suspenseful, cathartic, and serving justice. It was exciting to see if David Fincher could deliver on that criteria with this film.
It is definitely suspenseful, as the colorless visuals leave plenty of space for the viewer to wonder about the plot. The empty surroundings of an upper class suburb and the bland interiors of a picture perfect house make you feel as if you are living inside the monotonous and colorless world of Amy and Nick Dunne. When there’s not much to look at, waiting in suspense is basically all that one can do.
On the other hand, Rosamund Pike plays the perfect victim. Her petite features and preternatural grace contradict Matt Damon’s ruggedness and lack of poise. Little does anyone know, Amy is anything but the angelic victim that everyone wants her to be.
The film’s structure switches between showing flashbacks of Amy and Nicks relationship timeline, and the events following her disappearance. This makes for quite an effective reveal of Amy’s motivations, as we see her feelings about her marriage and Nick’s adultery as justification of her framing him.
But the true catharsis comes not from Amy framing her husband, but from her completely escaping her suffocating life. When she leaves everything behind, cuts her hair and let’s herself be messy – all while delivering that iconic “cool girl” monologue – that is the moment the tension in the movie gets a breather.
The thing that makes Gone Girl different from other scorned-woman stories is that Amy is a villain before she is wronged. She has a history of getting men in trouble by playing the victim. Ironically, the plot twist doesn’t entirely cleanse the viewer’s perception of Nick. He is as guilty as he was branded to be from the beginning, but just for a different sin. Which is why it feels so fitting that Amy made him suffer, as if justice had been delivered.
