Gone Girl
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: October 3, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
79
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 49 Critic Reviews
Positive:
39
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallOct 1, 2014
Gone Girl is a terrific movie, everything the book and its fans deserve. Read full review
100
USA TodayClaudia PuigOct 1, 2014
Grimly dark humor and spot-on production design buttress the captivating story and heighten the unnerving atmosphere...Gone Girl will leave you breathless and haunted. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierSep 27, 2014
Fincher is a fearless filmmaker who understands his audience’s intelligence (not to mention their cinematic blood lust). By the end of Gone Girl, we feel like we’ve lived through about four movies, not just one. Good luck letting go of any of them. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranSep 25, 2014
Superbly cast from the two at the top to the smallest speaking parts, impeccably directed by Fincher and crafted by his regular team to within an inch of its life, Gone Girl shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatySep 22, 2014
Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face. You can stop being nervous. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 22, 2014
It's a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage). Read full review
100
VarietyJustin ChangSep 21, 2014
Surgically precise, grimly funny and entirely mesmerizing over the course of its swift 149-minute running time, this taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material. Read full review
91
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanOct 2, 2014
Gone Girl offers interesting, even amusing audio cues: the sound of a distant mourning dove when we suspect Amy’s been killed, or Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” playing on a car radio as Nick returns his obnoxious father to an assisted care center. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianJeff BakerOct 2, 2014
Twisty pulp entertainment at its highest level. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyOct 1, 2014
The movie’s most tantalizing mystery is the question of what’s really going on in their heads. It remains unanswered. Read full review
91
HitfixDrew McWeenySep 27, 2014
Gone Girl is not Fincher's best film, nor is it the most conventionally satisfying of them, but it feels like this is a movie that represents the very best that Hollywood craft can offer at the moment. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 1, 2014
David Fincher's meticulous direction pays off in spades. From the way he expresses the book's construction — not quite he-said/she-said, but a version of that — to the way the film looks (cold and uncaring, like its characters) to his work with actors (go Tyler Perry!), Gone Girl delivers. Read full review
90
The DissolveGenevieve KoskiOct 1, 2014
Gone Girl reveals itself as an optimal meeting of the minds, a perfect amalgam of a writer and a director with complementary fixations. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 22, 2014
The movie is phenomenally gripping—although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people. Read full review
90
TheWrapJames RocchiSep 21, 2014
Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovOct 1, 2014
Fantasies and phantasms aside, Fincher proves himself yet again to be a better cinematic psychologist of (in-)human nature than almost any other director alive. It’s another squirmily excellent date movie from hell, courtesy of contemporary cinema’s most overt nihilist. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyOct 3, 2014
Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 3, 2014
Gone Girl is a rare movie: a delicious thriller that provides plenty of titillation and gruesome pleasure while offering a dollop of social commentary. It's smart, twisted, bloody, and almost guaranteed to satisfy anyone with a penchant for the macabre. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzOct 2, 2014
Gone Girl is art and entertainment, a thriller and an issue, and an eerily assured audience picture. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperOct 2, 2014
The editing, with so many twists and turns and so many supporting characters needing their due, is without hiccups. And thankfully, there’s plenty of dark humor. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 1, 2014
David Fincher's film version of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl is a stealthy, snake-like achievement. It's everything the book was and more — more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversSep 25, 2014
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. Read full review
87
Film.comKate ErblandSep 29, 2014
Gone Girl is a rare bird: a tricky, weird mystery that benefits from people knowing its twist from the outset. Read full review
80
TimeRichard CorlissOct 2, 2014
In a movie of subtle tones and wild swerves, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part. Read full review
80
SlateDana StevensOct 2, 2014
Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work. Read full review
80
SalonAndrew O'HehirOct 1, 2014
It’s a work of chilly wit and bleak metaphor, an artifice that invites the kind of analytical response where we pull on our chins and discuss how other people, more naive than we, will receive it. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamSep 22, 2014
Doesn’t have the heft of Zodiac or the verve of Se7en but Gone Girl is a masterful adaptation and a superior crime-thriller. As for Fincher changing the ending… See for yourself. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerSep 22, 2014
Stylish, twisted and daring, Gone Girl is a David Fincher date movie: dark, smart and dangerous. If it doesn’t deliver in its finale, its twist, turns and commitment to moral repugnance will leave you reeling. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksSep 22, 2014
Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 22, 2014
For all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 21, 2014
A sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director's adaptation of another publishing phenomenon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: “Is that all there is?” Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 2, 2014
The less you know about Gone Girl going in the better, but even knowing what’s ahead doesn’t prepare you for the movie’s tone, which is funny yet curdled and cynical and black. This is a satirical antidote to the feel-good pap most Hollywood movies about relationships push on their audiences - here’s the perfect date movie for someone you want to break up with. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsOct 2, 2014
Ultimately what makes Gone Girl so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. The director bathes the B-movie scenario in the queasy-green hues of a morgue, while Affleck flashes his million-dollar smile like a dime-store Dracula and the beautifully inscrutable Pike absorbs the light like a wax mannequin. If it’s true that Nick and Amy were made for each other, they were made in a fiendish lab. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 1, 2014
Gone Girl is a great thriller until it stops being one, about 20 minutes before the finish. Until then it’s brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy, a movie that keeps the audience grasping and reaching in all the wrong directions, while consistently delivering something a little better, a little crazier and a little more disturbing than expected. Read full review
75
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreOct 1, 2014
It’s good, but we’ve come to expect more from the guy who gave us “Fight Club” and “The Social Network.” This is more on a par with “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The calculated shocks feel like a movie we’ve seen before, though at least in this case, that’s not true. Read full review
75
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthSep 25, 2014
While Gone Girl is certainly his slightest film to date, it's nonetheless undeniably gripping. Fincher clearly enjoys turning the screws and rounding the wild corners of the plot from the first frame. Read full review
70
NPRBob MondelloOct 3, 2014
By the end of Gone Girl, the social issues that animate the film's beginning — job loss in an economic downturn, differences in wealth and class, media manipulation — have receded, and things have gotten so plot-driven and pulpy, there's nothing to challenge the director or make him stretch. In the film's final stages he seems to be relying entirely on craft — but, boy, is it effective craft. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternSep 25, 2014
The movie, with some of the trappings of a murder mystery, makes its points with blunt force. Fun seldom figures in this adaptation, which is overlong and mysteriously unaffecting. Still, Mr. Fincher's film has many fascinations. Read full review
70
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekSep 23, 2014
The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick. Read full review
60
CineVueDaniel GreenSep 27, 2014
Though some artfulness is dredged up amongst the trash, there's plenty to perturb and perplex. Read full review
60
The New York TimesManohla DargisSep 25, 2014
At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 3, 2014
A few of the supporting players, including Kim Dickens, as a suspicious local cop, and Carrie Coon, as Nick’s twin sister, move beyond the formulaic, which is more than can be said for the movie. Read full review
58
IndieWireMichael NordineSep 21, 2014
Fincher likely prides himself on turning coal into diamonds at this point, but Flynn's script can feel so retrograde at times that one wonders whether it might have been better served by a De Palma, Bigelow, or even a Verhoeven — which is to say, a filmmaker less concerned with making the lascivious seem prestigious. Read full review
50
New York PostLou LumenickOct 2, 2014
A glossy, empty and ultimately unsatisfying — if undeniably entertaining — movie. Read full review
50
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 2, 2014
Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyOct 1, 2014
Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedOct 1, 2014
Preposterous, illogical, senselessly over-plotted and artificial as a ceramic artichoke, David Fincher’s Gone Girl is another splatterfest disguised as a psychological thriller about the disintegration of a murderous marriage that I find one of the year’s grossest disappointments. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 29, 2014
The glum fact is that Gone Girl lacks clout where it needs it most, at its core. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSep 27, 2014
There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults. Read full review
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