Rosamund Pike's transformation into the brittle, manipulative - and very American - Gone Girl shows

Millions of people, having read Gillian Flynn’s best-selling psychological thriller, already know the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a handsome couple living in the American Midwest whose marriage has started to implode before she goes missing on their fifth wedding anniversary.

David Fincher’s unrelentingly tense and sometimes disturbingly violent adaptation, responsibly handed an 18 certificate, pulls off a considerable trick: it will grip those who have read the book as much as it does those who haven’t.

The story, from a script by Flynn herself, begins with Nick (Ben Affleck) returning to their small-town Missouri home to find a coffee table overturned and signs of a violent struggle. Amy (Rosamund Pike) has disappeared, and the police, quickly on the scene, find specks of her blood. Detective Boney (nicely played by Kim Dickens) is smart, but not quite smart enough, and we, the audience, are kept one step ahead of her thanks to extracts from Amy’s diaries and a series of flashbacks, which show that a union founded on sizzling mutual attraction — ‘we’re so cute I want to punch us in the face’, she once declared, smugly — has begun to founder on acidic mutual disdain.

External circumstances haven’t helped. They were prosperous Manhattanites until Nick lost his job as a magazine journalist and Amy’s trust fund, started by her writer parents with the substantial proceeds from a series of wildly popular children’s books she inspired called Amazing Amy, started to dwindle.

They then left New York and returned to his home town, where his mother was dying. But Amy can’t settle there. Beautiful and seemingly poised, just as America would expect of the grown-up Amazing Amy, she seethes inwardly with recriminations and boredom.

Nick, too, seems outwardly content. With his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) he runs a bar that Amy helped him buy with the last of her trust-fund money. But he burns with resentment. At one level, the film is a forensic study of how any relationship, especially one with inadequate foundations, can crumble.

At another level, it is a straightforward thriller, but with a slow build of foreboding that Alfred Hitchcock would have admired. Indeed, there are manifest echoes of Psycho in Flynn’s screenplay.

But this is a missing-person mystery in the information age. When it becomes clear that the disappearance involves the former Amazing Amy, a media circus descends that Hitchcock would certainly not have recognised. Even before he is charged, Nick is subjected to trial by live, rolling television. Has he murdered his wife? The media think so, increasingly the police think so, but we, even though we are privy to more facts than either, just don’t know.

At least not until a mid-film revelation that I have no intention of sharing here. And even after that we’re still kept on tenterhooks.

Like Flynn’s book, the film cleverly plays fast and loose with our expectations and assumptions, tugging us one way and then the next. Fincher stayed faithful to his source material with his 2011 film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, another bestselling novel, as he does here, but this time he has much more to work with than he did with Stieg Larsson’s pulp thriller, not least that menacing and ever-present message: do any of us really know the people we live with? After all, we can’t look inside their heads, into their souls.

In the cases of Amy and Nick, such an examination would yield alarming results. They might have started to hate each other, but even so, he is more sociopathic, and she more cunningly manipulative, than either of them suspected.

Affleck and Pike convey these frailties, for the most part, with well-judged restraint. She in particular is a revelation — the one revelation about the film that I can share. In most of her roles (and, I can report, having once been given a lift in her beloved old Citroen, in real life too) she is an irreproachably genteel English rose, who here has turned herself into an incorrigibly spoilt American Wasp.

Coincidentally, Pike plays another unhappily-married woman in What We Did On Our Holiday, a charmingly whimsical comedy also currently showing in cinemas (reviewed here last week), but that character isn’t much of a stretch for her.

This one is, and not just because she has first to nail the accent. Indeed, it may well prove to be a career-turning role, and three cheers for Fincher for choosing her, when actresses of the calibre and renown of Charlize Theron and Natalie Portman had also reportedly expressed interest.

Three cheers too for Flynn, who claims to have pictured what Fincher (whose extensive and eclectic cv includes Se7en, Fight Club, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network) would do with the story even while she was first writing it. She was right in that he is the ideal director for a story like this, with a sure feel for suspense, but also an eye and ear for suburban American mores that even he has rarely dissected quite so ruthlessly.

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