This onslaught forces Nick to hire superstar attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry, making another foray into serious dramas). Tanner is known in the media as the patron saint of wife killers and his plan is to tear down the rose-tinted view America has of Amy, at the same time undermine the hatred they have found for Nick. As a strategy and in the way Tanner Bolt phrases/delivers his lines, you get the idea very quickly that guilt or innocence will most likely have very little to do with the outcome of this case. Perception is key.
The media’s “investigation” is paralleled by the local police’s work on the investigation. The more the evidence mounts up, the more the pair suspect Nick of killing his wife and hiding her body, but with no body and no murder weapon, they’ve hit an impasse. As per their tradition Amy had set up a treasure hunt for Nick to complete on the morning of their anniversary and as the police track down these clues they start to see a very interesting picture, at the same time it’s incomplete and inconsistent. Unlike the news outlets, for them it’s evidence or nothing.
The movie has several flashbacks built from Amy’s journal entries that show the relationship with Nick bloom at the start where they spark at a party and have a great sexual tension and onscreen chemistry. It follows how they fall madly in love, how they are perfect for each other, it covers those inside jokes that couples have and how people gradually start to build worlds around the person they love and eventually how devastating that can be if the person you love turns out not to be the person you expected.
These early passages could be the set up for a romantic comedy or an interesting indie comedy-drama. The fact that these early stages of their relationship are so relatable and so well done can make for uncomfortable viewing. The amount of times the film hits perfectly on a relationships beat makes the knowledge of what their relationship became all the more poignant.
It could just have been a movie about a relationship gone bad but the film has a much darker topic in its sights. The film deals with how we view ourselves and how we project that self-image upon the world, especially in relationships.
The children’s books of Amy’s life are the best version of a life that never was. Amazing Amy is
just a character while the “real Amy” led a different life. Within these journal entries we see the two people begin to let that façade slip and finally be done away with altogether. Was this breakdown of a relationship enough to push Nick to do something terrible?
As Warned: These won’t be spoilers in the usual sense as the revelations I’m going to go into happen at about the half way mark of the movie and I wouldn’t dream of revealing the end.
***Spoiler Warning…Seriously***
The Revelation is that Amy Dunne is in fact still alive and has orchestrated the entire disappearance as revenge for her husband Nick’s infidelity. Having caught him kissing another girl at his bar she set about faking her journal, staging violence in the house and planting the seeds for Nick’s destruction along the trail of clues that she left for the anniversary treasure hunt. Her plan is to have him go to death row for her murder.
With this revelation the film takes a very sharp left turn away from the movie it set itself up as. Much like the titular character, the film has been fooling us into believing that it is something it is not. Sure it looks like a domestic drama, a media satire and a police procedural but it’s not. It does each one of these things so well that we are side swiped in the best way possible by the third act.
When this act kicks in you realise that the film owes way more to trashy erotic thrillers of the eighties and early nineties that it does to anything else. It samples various tropes and imagery from this sleazy buffet and with Fincher’s guiding hand makes them fresh and salaciously enthralling again. After that slow build up the relief was released by the audience I watched it in disbelieving laughter as the film descended more and more into something akin to farce or as Fincher has described it “an Absurdist Thriller”.
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