Rating :   70/100                                                                     149 Min       

David Fincher teams up with screenwriter and author Gillian Flynn as she adapts her own smash hit novel of 2012 for the big-screen, with Ben Affleck in the main role of a husband who’s wife has disappeared, the titular gone girl, but we don’t know if she has been abducted, murdered by intruders, or if her husband cut her into bits with a potato peeler for turning off his Playstation and then fed her to the squirrels in the back garden. We do know there was a violent scene with some blood for the detectives to find in the couple’s home …

As we might expect from Fincher, this is a long and drawn out mystery which serves it well – and it is equally well suited to Affleck’s acting style as you genuinely can’t tell if he’s lying or not (make of that what you will) as we are pulled this way and that along with the other spectators in the escalating media frenzy surrounding the case. It holds attention from start to finish and develops at a rewarding pace, but Fincher has missed a bit of a golden opportunity – he is so used to the sort of narrative maze that he has been crafting in films for years that he over indulges in it to an extent, so when some very, very interesting human relations are brought to the fore they aren’t given the time and treatment they are deserving of. Shame it didn’t dare to tread a lot more heavily on the dark earth it treads, but well crafted and executed all the same.