10 years ago, 'Gone Girl' was an intense tale of marriage gone awry

David Fincher's adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel delighted in the specific true-crime tropes of the era in which it was made.

Gone Girl exploded on the scene, like few movies do, ten years ago this week.

The story of a broken marriage between two terrible people led to a murder-framing plot that played into every single true-crime trope of that period; Gone Girl was an absolute hoot- and occasioned a billion think pieces about whether it was feminist, sexist, both, or neither.

Directed by David Fincher, immediately after The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl was adapted from the novel by Gillian Flynn, with Flynn writing the script herself. Flynn started as a writer for Entertainment Weekly, where everything seemed to be written with a singular editorial voice. Still, she broke out and carved out her own voice, adding the detail of both main characters being refugees from the New York magazine world.

When Gone Girl begins, Nick and Amy (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) are a married couple living in Missouri. They moved there to care for Nick’s dying mother after they lost their New York media jobs in the 2008 recession. This has caused their marriage to fray, as did Affleck’s affair with one of his creative writing students (Emily Ratajkowski, making her major film debut.) The movie also treats the small-town Midwest, at least from Amy’s point of view, like a close approximation of hell on Earth. 

On their tenth anniversary, Amy disappears, and suspicion falls on Nick, especially since he didn’t react as everyone thought he should, especially in his television appearances. Fincher brilliantly used Affleck’s established screen persona in this aspect of the film. He showed his trademark aloofness and was highly believable as the guy everyone was mad at for cheating on his wife- and this was after years of jokes about Affleck’s resemblance to the real-life wife killer Scott Peterson.

When I took an early class on journalism in college, one of the first lessons our professor taught us was, “It’s always the husband.” And yes, in cases like this, it almost always is. But in the case of Gone Girl, as we find out halfway through, Nick did not kill his wife, but Amy went on the run, having set up elaborate clues meant to frame her husband for her murder.

First, she emerges alive, then she gives the famous “Cool Girl” speech, and then she violently murders Neil Patrick Harris, before returning home covered in blood. It was a star-making turn for Pike, which earned her an Oscar nomination.

The big thing that makes Gone Girl work is its keen understanding of the specific true-crime tropes of the time.