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By Sandra Olmsted

(While fans of the book know what happens, I have done my best not to spoil the plot for those unfamiliar with the novel.)

The old joke about the first suspect being the murder victim’s husband or wife and that’s all you need to know about marriage forms the basic premise of director David Fincher adaptation of the novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. The film opens on the morning of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) Dunne’s fifth anniversary, and Nick leave early for his lackluster job as a bar owner and chews the fat and his wife over coffee with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). When Nick returns home, Amy is missing, and the house looks as though a crime has been staged there — at least to Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens). Meanwhile, Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) knows that Nick did it.

Delayed at the police station to answer questions and then asked why he hasn’t called Amy’s parents, Nick’s frustration and anger make him look like he could do something to his beautiful wife. Nick and Amy’s life together is revealed through flashbacks, and Amy moved from New York City where the two fell in love to small town Missouri to help Nick take care of his mother while she died of cancer. Amy also used her trust fund to buy Nick the bar he and Margo run. Amy’s parents, Marybeth (Lisa Banes) and Rand (David Clennon) Elliot, wrote and marketed a famous series of children’s books about a character named Amazing Amy, and this alter ego outshone, out-achieved, and out-succeeded the real Amy time and time again while she was growing up. Amy’s desire to finally do something, anything to best this fictional sibling and to be the center of the media circus drives her on many levels.

While the police investigation pokes around in Nick and Amy’s fragile marriage and messed up life, the press, especially Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle), try and convict Nick on TV cable news for the ratings. Noelle Hawthorne (Casey Wilson), a pesky neighbor who claims to be Amy’s best friend, shares Amy’s complaints about Nick and their marriage. Certainly, Nick has done some questionable things, but did he kill his wife? Later, Nick and Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), his high powered lawyer, who is known for getting wife-murderers off, poke around in Amy’s past and find some startling patterns, such as how she treated Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris). Fincher has now set the stage for a gripping and surprising suspense thriller.

Working from Flynn’s excellently distillation of the Gone Girl novel and her exceptional debut screenplay, Fincher manipulates the audience and takes a long, bleak look at marriage and at how relationships can trap people. Perhaps not Finchers’s best, most disturbing look at the psychology of his characters and at modern life, Gone Girl still examines the dark secrets and violence lurking under married life while delivering ample plot twists. The actors and actresses gloriously embody Fincher’s cynicism, especially Affleck and Pike although all the supporting cast equally carry the film. Director of photography Jeff Cronenweth and production designer Donald Graham Burt turn Cape Girardeau into a boring midwestern town named North Carthage while making the flashbacks to the Dunnes’ life in the big city more glamorous.

A Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation release, Gone Girl is in theaters now, and well worth seeing as it may be an Oscar contender. Gone Girl runs a surprisingly quick 149 minutes and is rated R for a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language

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