It's hard to discuss the plot of Gone Girl without venturing into spoilers, but that's all right—the plot of Gone Girl doesn't really matter. I can already hear some of the ten million or so of you who've read Gillian Flynn's novel rearing back with offense. "Doesn't matter? But Gone Girl is a best seller because of its intricate plot, unreliable narrators, and twists that could snap a neck!" Yeah, sure. I read the book, and I liked it. The movie's just as fun and compelling as the book, too. But let me explain.

All you really need to know about Gone Girl is that it's the story of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), a young married couple priced out of New York City and living in Missouri. When Amy goes missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, the media spotlight focuses on Nick, who begins acting abnormally. (But, then, how is a man in that situation supposed to act? Wouldn't acting normally be abnormal?) The film adaptation of Gone Girl hews pretty closely to the book's narrative. While Flynn necessarily abandoned a few themes and twists in the screenplay she adapted from her own book, the film is two and a half hours long and the book is practically written in screenplay form to begin with, so not as much gets cut as you'd expect—and the deletions don't damage the story at all.

Because Gone Girl is directed by David Fincher, it's a beautiful film, with exquisite cinematography and a thoughtful visual language. Fincher eschews close-ups—this is a story about liars, and liars can't withstand the invasive honesty of a camera lens in their faces—and the palette falls heavily on the cerulean glow of dawn and the warm earth tones of boring suburbia. On the surface, the beauty that Fincher brings to Gone Girl comes across as almost too much effort for Flynn's potboiler. (It must be noted that Fincher's deeply masculine perspective brings a few unwelcome moments of misogyny to Flynn's story, too.)

Fincher draws excellent performances out of his cast. Kim Dickens and Tyler Perry contribute vivid interior lives to their supporting characters. Even typically mediocre-at-best Affleck is excellent here, simply because the camera captures Affleck's smarmy, self-protective dullness and makes it Nick's own. But this film is entirely Pike's. Her Amy is intelligent and self-pitying and aloof and thrilling and whatever you want her to be, but you feel like you can partially perceive the truth of her in split seconds, a burst of honest emotion surfacing in a flash before it dives deep into the shadows. Amy is the next evolutionary step up from Hitchcock's icy blonds, an object of desire and mystery who can never be truly understood. Unlike those femmes fatale of noirs past, though, Amy has her own desires and the agency to act on them. Cary Grant would soil his bespoke suit if he found himself in a room with her.

And so what does it all amount to? Critics who choose to pick apart Gone Girl for its lack of realism or its unbelievable plot twists are either stupid or willfully missing the point. This is a portrait of a marriage in modern America, where the middle class is being choked out by financial forces beyond its understanding, where the suburbs are haunted by the fear of a growing number of visible homeless people and a zombie army of prescription-drug-addled dropouts finding shelter in the abandoned husk of consumer society. The media is a shimmering cloud of guppies brainlessly chasing a flashlight around. Everyone is cocooning in their homes and distracting themselves with technology as they wait for the bad times to blow over. They slowly realize, by the early light of day, that the bad times are here to stay. recommended