Not all book-to-movie adaptations are created equal, but when the mind that penned the original novel also works on the screenplay, there’s usually cause to be a tad more optimistic. Gone Girl was no exception.

Gillian Flynn keeps many of the intricate character details that made the book so compulsive to read and director David Fincher is a master in creating the movie equivalent of a page turner. The pacing of Gone Girl is perfect, keeping the audience engaged for its lengthy 145 minutes, and Fincher’s characteristic quiet, creeping sense of dread taints even the happier flashback scenes with the inevitable future despair of the couple.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike give superbly poised performances as Nick and Amy Dunne. Both characters are writers, fresh from losing their jobs and living back in Nick’s small hometown. When Amy goes missing we watch as Nick attempts to ward off the media storm surrounding her disappearance, with public opinion increasingly pointing the finger at him. Affleck is unsettling and impossible to root for, whilst Pike is beautiful, cold, and always at a distance despite the intimacy of her diary entries. She is truly ‘gone’, just out of reach for her husband, the audience, and herself.

We watch a couple’s lives come together and tear apart so that romance and its demise seem hubristically linked. In one intimate moment Amy exclaims “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face!” perfectly encompassing the mix of romance, violence, and dark humour that stir relentlessly through the film. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth favours a muted colour palette, echoing the sense that everything within the story is tinged with darkness and sinister undertones and keeping a cool detachment over scenes of sexual and violent passion, which reflects the characters’ own detachment from their lives.

Finely drawn secondary characters provide lighter moments that punctuate the overall mystery, but the film is a thriller at heart. Gone Girl is packed with plot twists, and Affleck and Pike are just unsettling enough to keep you guessing right until the end.