Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike: What the critics are saying

EXPECT a stampede at the box office. That’s what the critics are predicting when Gone Girl hits the silver screen next month, some are already calling it the movie of the year.

EXPECT a stampede at the box office come October 2.

That’s what the movie critics are predicting when David Fincher’s Gone Girl hits the silver screen next month.

The film, adapted by Gillian Flynn’s 2012 best-selling novel, is already being praised as “the movie of its cultural moment”, with lead actors Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike delivering the performances of their screen careers.

For those who haven’t yet read the book, Gone Girl is about a husband, Nick Dunne (Affleck), who is suspected of murdering his wife, Amy (Pike). As the film begins, Amy has just gone missing from her home in Missouri on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary and the police suspect she may have been murdered. As the search gets underway, viewers are taken back in time to the pair’s first meeting, their courtship and marriage.

Under the scrutiny of a growing media frenzy, the pair’s image of a perfect union starts to crumble and a web of lies, deceit and strange behaviour leaves everyone wondering if Nick is capable of murdering his beautiful wife.

Fincher, who brought us Fight Club, Se7en, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, worked from a closely shaped script by Flynn herself to recreate the best-selling thriller for the big screen.

Fincher himself promises to deliver the date movie to “end 15 million marriages” in 148 gripping minutes.

Not to mention, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Scoot McNairy and Missi Pyle also star in the R-rated flick.

If the early reviews are anything to go by, it’s not too often that film critics applaud a screen adaptation for living up to its page-turning original.

Here are just some of the early reviews:

• “Affleck, who has never been more ideally cast, delivers a beautiful balancing act of a performance, fostering both sympathy and the suspicion that his true self lies somewhere between shallow jerk and heartless murderer.” - The Hollywood Reporter

• “Gone Girl ranks with those other classics of malice, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. Only possibly better.” - People magazine

• “The movie is phenomenally gripping ... Fincher’s is a world of masks, misrepresentations, subtle and vast distortions. Truth is rarely glimpsed. Media lie. Surfaces lie.” - Vulture

• “David Fincher’s shockingly good film version of Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another ... Gone Girl has the impact of a body-slam, hitting home in every scary, suspenseful, seductive particular.” - Rolling Stone

• “Gone Girl is so full of reversals and so laden with irony that its attempts at a Husbands And Wives-style anatomy of a relationship under strain soon begin to founder.” — The Independent

• “Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face.” — Entertainment Weekly

• “Fincher ... has pushed past the book’s page-turning suspense and zeroed in on its true nagging power: This is less a thriller than a psychosexual horror story.” - People magazine

Gone Girl opens in cinemas nationally on October 2.