Weekly Film Analysis: Gone Girl (2014)

Gone girl is a 2014 American psychological thriller and the themes that run throughout this film are lust, love, hate, revenge, disturbance, etc. This film was directed by David Fincher, written by Gillian Flynn based on the 2012 novel. This film stars the famous Ben Affleck (male protagonist) and Rosemund Pike (female antagonist).  The company productions of this film were Regency Enterprises and distributed by 20^th Century Fox. The film was located in the United States, budget of the film was $61 million and box office came out to be $389.3 million. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 88%, based on 281 reviews, with a rating average of 8/10. The site read: "Dark, intelligent, and stylish to a fault, Gone Girl plays to the strengths of director David Fincher while bringing the best out of stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike”.

 

The scene starts with 20th century fox. The scene then starts with a narrative structure of a man talking about his wife, and stroking her head. Already, this shows the wife’s vulnerability and his dominance through performance. This is shown when she looks up to the camera, showing that the audience is in the eyes of the husband. He states ‘I picture cracking her lovely skull’ making him sound like he wants to kill her, making her look like the victim. In contrast, as the film goes on, we discover that the wife made him a diary to make him look like he kidnapped her when she was ‘gone’. This made him look like the culprit and really illuminated to the audience that the husband was the victim after all.

The use of light is used to show Amy’s dark, mentally ill behavior. A wide shot presents this clearly when she is facing her husband and one side of her face is shadowed. This gives an indication to the audience that half of her is innocent, vulnerable and kind and the other side shows that she is evil, dark, even potentially foreshadowing what she is capable of in this film. The microelement of performance shows that Amy is the antagonist as Nick tries to escape her psychotic behaviour as he found out what she is capable of and Amy reveals she is pregnant, having artificially inseminated herself with Nick's sperm stored at a fertility clinic. Nick doubts the child is his and says he will undertake a paternity test. Nick reacts violently to Amy's firmness that they remain married, but feels responsible for the child. Despite nick’s objections, he reluctantly decides to stay with Amy. The "happy" couple announces on television that they are having a child. The theme presented here is isolation, trapped and fear as he couldn’t leave her due to a child.