“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. After the dour, sour, sadistic Scandanavian misfire of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a pleasure to note that Fincher’s latest adaptation, of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel of the same name, is both wicked and wickedly fun. The score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is a more mixed proposition, effective in the places it works and distracting on several occasions where it doesn’t. Ben Affleck plays Nick, a guy with a cloud of sadness around him, who goes home to find that his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), is missing and that there are signs of a struggle. He knows that our attention is straying from the main couple toward the outlying figures: Tanner himself, Detective Boney, and, best of all, Margo—a fine performance, both grounded and wounded, from Carrie Coon. For the first hour, “Gone Girl” takes place on two tracks. Amy’s mom and dad are best-selling authors of children’s books, with their series “Amazing Amy” an improved version of their daughter’s life; Nick and Amy’s American dream marriage with the big house and the big love looks is utterly perfect until you shake it and the rot comes spilling out. Juicy roles 
 
 Affleck has had good roles before, but I don’t think he has ever had one that capitalizes on as much of what he can do onscreen. “Gone Girl” will earn plenty of loud shouts of applause, awed sounds of surprise, and shocked laughter, but what makes it worthy of them is all the hushed, uneasy conversations it’s guaranteed to inspire in the long, unsettled silence to come after. The story may be the star here, but everyone is vivid within it, not just the principals, but Kim Dickens as a detective, Tyler Perry as a hotshot lawyer and Carrie Coon as Affleck's twin sister. Not geographically; he seems less absorbed in North Carthage, described by Amy as “the navel of the country,” than he was in the California of “Zodiac” or the Harvard of “The Social Network.” Those are his masterpieces: the two movies that I can’t not watch when they turn up on TV, and the two occasions on which his pedantry and his paranoia have fused together, engrossing us in a crazed aggregation of detail. See video: New ‘Gone Girl’ Trailer Suggests That Ben Affleck Murdered His Wife (Video) 
 
 Like some mix of “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Ace in The Hole” as shot by Michael Mann with a Hitchcock Blonde to kill (or die) for in the lead, “Gone Girl” tells the story of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). “Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, starts with Nick (Ben Affleck)—in his own words, “a corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth Missouri boy.” He used to live in New York and write for magazines, but the work dried up and he returned home, to the uneventful town of North Carthage, with his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike).
– "Chilling," "unsettling," and "manipulative" is what critics are saying about Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy, a husband and wife trying to make it in a small town in Missouri—just the type of descriptors you probably want for a mystery-thriller about what happens when Nick becomes a suspect in Amy's sudden disappearance. Here's what the critics have to say: For Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle, the movie starts off "brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy," and maintains that momentum throughout … until the last 20 minutes. That's when LaSalle says the movie "frays"—a "Swiss watch of storytelling [that] turns into a bad digital clock circa 1986, flashing the wrong numbers." He praises the acting, especially that of Pike, proclaiming that "everyone who sees Gone Girl will walk out raving about" her. Manohla Dargis is similarly thrown off by the shift midway through the film, writing for the New York Times that "by the movie's second half, you may wish that Amy would stay gone." Although Dargis concedes that David "Fincher's compositions, camera work, and cutting are, as always, superbly controlled," she adds that the film "plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage." But evenutally, "dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie's tone and visuals until it's snuffed out all the light, air, and nuance." James Rocchi writes at The Wrap that Fincher's humor is "the spoonful of sugar that helps the malevolence go down in his films," and Gone Girl is no exception, with "top-notch suspenseful storytelling" and "razor-edged wit." He also lauds the supporting cast (including Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry) as "a thing of wonder" and praises the movie overall as "that rare entertainment that rewards your intelligence instead of insulting it, that rare thriller interested in emotional wounds as much as physical ones." But Gone Girl isn't as alluring as Fincher's The Social Network, laments Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, asking: "Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a website?" The film that Lane at first calls "natural Fincherland" soon devolves into a movie that "lacks clout." He also can't help but note that Gone Girl is "meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares?"