I have such mixed feelings on Gone Girl. In order to get into them, this is going to be rather spoiler rich review.

There’s nothing to say about the technical mastery (director David Fincher) and quality acting in this movie. This is all about the content. Nick Dunne (Ben Afleck) comes home one average day to the glass coffee table in the living room flipped over. His wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) isn’t there, but all her stuff is. He saw her that morning and alarmed at the scene, calls the police right away.

Amy is missing. Her parents fly into town, hotlines are set up, candle light vigils are started, police and volunteers search for her. Amy is faux famous, her parents use her name, likeness and life as the source of an incredibly popular children’s book series. It isn’t long before the story goes national. Then the police start finding evidence…

This evidence points to Nick being the murder. Blood splatters on kitchen walls, a massive blood pool on the kitchen floor poorly cleaned, a diary, a mistress, his temper flare ups. Nick seems to be telling a lot of lies, it doesn’t look good for him. Part of the Gone Girl story is the power of the media. Once they decide Nick is guilty, he works hard with his lawyer to turn the public opinion around on him. That’s  a tall order that requires a lot of coaching (I like the Nancy Grace doppelganger. Them using each other at the end is very true and telling of news stations today).

Gone Girl has a few hooks. It starts off as this missing person story and it seems to be pretty straight forward. Amy narrates quite a bit of the story, as if she’s talking from the grave. But things seem odd, the pieces of the puzzle are bent a bit. You question if Nick did it, the treasure hunt she has him on for their anniversary is really weird. Then it’s revealed that Amy has set him up. She goes from sympathetic narrator to diabolical sociopath.

Amy’s set up this really clever murder plot to get revenge on her cheating husband. She’s furious at all the time she’s wasted on him. For awhile it looks like she has all the bases covered, down to going to the extreme of killing herself to get him on death row. Turns out, she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. She screws up and has to come up with a contingency plan on the fly.

Up until this point, Gone Girl is really great. All this stuff is unfolding in front of you, and you switch sides on who to hate a few times. It’s a great detective/mystery plot that would do Batman proud. Once that first hook releases, you’re on Nick’s side for the rest of the movie. Watching him and his sister put things together is great. Seeing Amy screw up is so satisfying. She’s so arrogant she never thought her plan wouldn’t work.

Now, my problem comes with what she does to salvage her plan. The first half of the movie is crazy and dark. Then it goes over the deep end. You think everything up to that point was twisted, but that’s just the tip of the lithium infused iceberg. She frames an old flame for her disappearance. This opens up so many variables for her to get caught, that it’s unbelievable (the treasure hunt clues are pretty damning alone and the tons of surveillance footage at his house). It all boils down to the authorities not following up on anything because they completely buy her story from the get go. It’s a sensitive road to walk for sure, but Detective Rhonda Boney raises all sorts of good points and they all give her the immediate stink eye. The scenes with just Amy and Nick when she gets back is the stuff of nightmares, it’s so messed up.

Writing that just made me realize what really bothers me. Amy turns out to be The Joker and Batman never shows up to make her pay for her crimes (Batfleck pun not intended). It is a successful movie though. It accomplishes what it intended to do, but boy do you feel gross at the end of it.