On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) reports that his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) has disappeared. Pressured by the police and the ensuing media, the image of the model couple starts to fray at the edges. In their eyes, Amy represents a loving, attentive, perfect woman, who put aside her dreams and a brilliant career to support her unemployed husband. A fragile woman who left her native New York to follow her husband to the countryside close to Nick’s parents, where she spends her days waiting for him to come home. Nick’s lies and strange behavior soon have everyone asking the same question: did he kill his wife?

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Adapted from the bestseller of the same name by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl looks at the masks we all wear at the beginning of every relationship. We invent a character to seduce others and hope to meet their expectations. But Amy’s disappearance tears away those masks. David Fincher masterfully directs his actors, slowly revealing characters who are much darker than they seem at first, even as he presents the media in a less-than-positive light. The loving husband is actually unfaithful and the perfect wife is not perfect at all. The dissection of this couple is thrilling, as it looks at the need to always know what the other is thinking, whether they are all right, until one day realizing that they have actually been unwittingly destroying each other. The tension mounts and the actors’ real faces are revealed, with an almost maniacal precision in the characters’ body language and sentiments.

As we wait for Affleck to play Batman in Man of Steel, here is finally a role in which he is fun to watch. Fincher is not afraid of having Affleck show his somewhat crude side as a rough guy who thinks he can seduce the whole world with a smile. As for Rosamund Pike, she shines in yet another role that is far from the Bond Girl, full of complexity and intensity. Breathtaking until the very last scene.