Movie review: Gone Girl

Gone Girl
(R16), 165 minutes

If you're looking for something dark, calculated, disturbing and packed to the brim with suspense then Gone Girl is the movie for you. Rom-com fans best stop here.

Adapted from the bestselling novel written by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl the movie stays true to the book but is so well made for the silver screen it stands well and truly on its own as one of 2014's "must sees".

Ben Affleck stars as the main protagonist Nick Dunne - but don't let that put you off.

Affleck nails the smug, charming, sleazy and confused character that readers of the novel will know well as he tries to work out what has happened to his beautiful wife "Amazing Amy" Dunne, who disappears from their humdrum life in American suburbia under increasingly murky circumstances.

It's not long before fingers and "evidence" point at Nick and his twin Margot (Carrie Coon) as somehow being responsible behind the vanishing of America's latest sweetheart, and so the media frenzy grows.

But all is not what it seems. And Gone Girl takes you to the brink and back in terms of unfolding the tale.

It's easy for me to talk this movie up, especially with Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails behind the music (Reznor was also responsible for the soundrack for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)..

I might be a fan but the movie clearly had an impact on my fellow movie-goers, who let out a collective "woah" when the credits began to roll. The Mr, who watched it with me not knowing it was a book, also rates Gone Girl as a movie that's "up there" with the best this year.

And he usually prefers Cheech & Chong. Keep an eye out for Neil Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother Fame.