This acclaimed film adaptation of an already acclaimed book of the same name is billed as a tense plot-twisting success. We watch a marriage go stale and the wife fake her own disappearance in a meticulously planned attempt to frame her husband (whom she has grown to hate) for her murder. In the book the story is told by unreliable witnesses and the film takes this approach but with rather a jolting split about two thirds in when we see the story from Amy Dunne’s devastating angle. Amy is the product, literally, of her parents’ media manipulations and works of fiction based on her girlhood so it it plausible that she is revealed as a psychopath who blurs reality and play-acting, or rather knows only too well the difference. The film is a nice, but rather obvious, critique of the effect of American media fantasy about marriage, motherhood, etc. But for me the central scene of Amy’s blood soaked murder of a creepy male lover in mid-orgasm seemed to refer to a deeply misogynistic fantasy about women. It made me try to think of all the other plots in which women kill their lovers in the act of making love. The only one that comes to mind is the very different in mood, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. But there must be others. A review of Gone Girl is here.