While its official world premiere will take place this week at New York Film Festival, Fox revealed David Fincher‘s Gone Girl a bit early to some select press, and today, the first reviews arrived. For the most part overwhelmingly positive, the Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike-led film draws comparisons to Eyes Wide Shut and Scenes of a Marriage, among others, with praise for the performances and Fincher’s gripping approach for the entire 145-minute runtime. Set to be released in just under two weeks, check back for our review this weekend.
Along with a batch of reviews, Fox have also unveiled four new TV spots with additional footage, as well as more images and a quartet of posters that would make a Fincher-approved Valentine’s Day card. We also have the first four tracks and full tracklist from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘ score, which is set to be released on September 30th. Check out everything below, including snippets from all reviews, as we count down the days until one of our most-anticipated films of the fall.
Justin Chang at Variety:
A lady vanishes and is soon presumed dead, but it’s her marriage that winds up on the autopsy table in “Gone Girl,” David Fincher’s intricate and richly satisfying adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 mystery novel. Surgically precise, grimly funny and entirely mesmerizing over the course of its swift 149-minute running time, this taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material, fully expressing Fincher’s cynicism about the information age and his abiding fascination with the terror and violence lurking beneath the surfaces of contemporary American life. Graced with a mordant wit as dry and chilled as a good Chablis, as well as outstanding performances from Ben Affleck and a revelatory Rosamund Pike, Fox’s Oct. 3 wide release should push past its preordained Oscar-contender status to galvanize the mainstream.
In full accord w/ @justincchang: GONE GIRL is an exhilarating, pitch-black marital comedy; Fincher’s EYES WIDE SHUT; the movie of the year.
— Scott Foundas (@foundasonfilm) September 22, 2014
James Rocchi at The Wrap:
“Gone Girl” portrays marriage not just as warfare by other means but as many different kinds of battle — class conflict, sexual gamesmanship, wrangling over money, fighting over the future — with plenty of blood spilled. That’s part of what makes it as damned good as it is; “Gone Girl” is that rare entertainment that rewards your intelligence instead of insulting it, that rare thriller interested in emotional wounds as much as physical ones.
David Edelstein at Vulture:
The movie is phenomenally gripping—although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people. Though a woman wrote the script, the male gaze dominates, and this particular male—the director of Se7en and The Social Network—doesn’t have much faith in appearances, particularly women’s. Fincher’s is a world of masks, misrepresentations, subtle and vast distortions. Truth is rarely glimpsed. Media lie. Surfaces lie.
Todd McCarthy at THR:
This is one instance in which a writer won’t be able to complain about what the movies have done to her book. With a screenplay by the novelist herself, David Fincher’s film of Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s twisty, nasty and sensational best-seller, is a sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director’s adaptation of another publishing phenomenon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: “Is that all there is?”
Joshua Rothkopf at Time Out:
Transformed into the kind of wickedly confident Hollywood thriller you pray to see once in a decade, Gillian Flynn’s absorbing missing-wife novel emerges – via a faithful script by the author herself – as the stealthiest comedy since ‘American Psycho’. It’s a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage). No secrets will be revealed here, apart from an obvious one: director David Fincher, also the maker of ‘Seven’, ‘Zodiac’ and ‘The Social Network’, is more just than your everyday stylish cynic.
Simon Reynolds at Digital Spy:
Those who tore through Gillian Flynn’s source novel (she returns here as sole screenwriter) will recognize the twists and turns in this faithful translation, but that doesn’t detract from the finished product – it’s as much about the journey as the destination, and the Gone Girl movie grabs you in its vice-like grip from the opening seconds and doesn’t let go. There are moments in this film that will make your jaw drop in shock and horror.
Xan Brooks at The Guardian:
The knockabout Punch and Judy show undergoes a grand Hollywood upgrade on Gone Girl, a garish, gripping tale of a warring husband and wife that plays like a Relate counsellor’s worst nightmare. The fur flies and the blows are landed, and the smalltown cops are reduced to impotent bystanders. All credit to director David Fincher, who appears to take an unholy delight in tugging the rug and springing the traps. His film shoves us so forcefully past the plot’s mounting implausibilities that we barely have the time to register one crime before we’re on to the next. That’s the way to do it.
Robbie Collin at The Telegraph:
In Fincher’s hands, that smart but arguably undisciplined story becomes something even wilder and yet perversely also more controlled – a neo-noir thriller turned on its blood-spattered head. Here, it’s the homme, rather than the femme, who has the fatale aura, and what comes out of the past only serves to further cloud the murky present.
Ian Freer at Empire:
David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens with a weirdly framed close-up of Amy Dunne’s (Rosamund Pike) head, while her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) muses on the often unspoken thoughts that might course through any marriage: “What are you thinking?” “How are you feeling?” “What have we done to each other?” The complex psychology and shifting dynamics of long-term relationships are just two of the engines driving Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 battle of the sexes bookbuster; others include the pernicious voyeurism of the media, the way we curate and present our personalities in the modern era and just how will Ben Affleck fit into that batsuit with that belly? The net result is, especially in its first two thirds, a cinematic equivalent of a juicy page-turner, a gripping, sharp, blissfully entertaining thriller that pushes every hot-topic button you can think of to become the must-talk-about film of the year.
Graham Fuller at Screen Daily:
Ostensibly a serpentine cat and mouse thriller that will leave many viewers looking askance at their spouses, David Fincher’s guileful Gone Girl – which opens the New York Film Festival – should transcend its aura of adult sophistication to become a major hit in all territories. Awards prospects are less certain for the long-anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller. Ben Affleck will grab some voters’ attention as the ambiguously glib Nick Dunne, however, and Rosamund Pike’s dynamic turn as his fierce wife Amy – the missing woman of the title – should belatedly make the gifted English a star.
Michael Nordine at Indiewire:
This mix of the violent and the ruminative is typical of director David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel, a missing-person thriller in which a given character’s status as victim or villain changes from one scene to the next. “What have we done to each other? What will we do?” Nick asks more than once about his significant other, who vanishes under curious circumstances on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary; that such questions manage to feel vaguely romantic in spite of their troubling subtext is a credit to Fincher, who’s made a habit (if not a career) of elevating questionable source material.
Kate Muir at The Times:
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.
1. What Have We Done To Each Other?
2. Sugar Storm
3. Empty Places
4. With Suspicion
5. Just Like You
6. Appearances
7. Clue One
8. Clue Two
9. Background Noise
10. Procedural
11. Something Disposable
12. Like Home
13. Empty Places (Reprise)
14. The Way He Looks At Me
15. Technically, Missing
16. Secrets
17. Perpetual
18. Strange Activities
19. Still Gone
20. A Reflection
21. Consummation
22. Sugar Storm (Reprise)
23. What Will We Do?
24. At Risk
Gone Girl opens on October 3rd.