Scenarist Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher deliver an adaptation of Flynn's novel that takes an intense, slow burn story and somehow remakes it into a dull, suspense-sapping film that goes on far too long. Filming in the dark style that has become his trademark, Fincher treats his material with seeming indifference, apparently not finding enough compelling material to engage with and he settles for competent performances without nuance from leads Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Flynn's screenplay doesn't help: the twisting, devious plot as told by unreliable narrators that delighted and disturbed in her novel here gets a hurried treatment that seems to trivialize important episodes. Yet it's bloated where the novel was propulsive. Flynn's book was a cynical but identifiable take on marriage in America, marred by a fizzled, inert ending; yet here by the end she has turned her thesis into something larger and uglier, a violent war waged by calculating women against unwitting men.
