As far as first reviews go, Gone Girl gets universal acclaim.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name from US writer Gillian Flynn, director David Fincher (The Social Network, Fight Club) has served up revenge exactly as the author intended, with Hollywood film website Variety calling it “phenomenally gripping.”

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If you haven’t read the book and have managed to avoid the movie’s hype, Gone Girl is a murder mystery cum vindictive relationship drama, with an incredibly noir twist.

The film adaptation stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, the aggrieved and grieving husband, and Rosamund Pike as Amy his wife, who is bookended as flawless and psychotically flawed.

When Amy goes missing, Nick soon becomes prime suspect for her murder, what follows is a character assassination of both the main characters as they tell their sides of their sordid, unhappy relationship.

It is a dark story that was considered the page turner of 2012 when the novel was first released. The film sounds equally, if not more, captivating.

“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,” Variety’s critic David Edelstein wrote.

“Though a woman wrote the script, the male gaze dominates, and this particular male—the director of Se7en and The Social Network—doesn’t have much faith in appearances, particularly women’s. Fincher’s is a world of masks, misrepresentations, subtle and vast distortions. Truth is rarely glimpsed. Media lie. Surfaces lie.”

The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin gave the film four stars and says Fincher has created a “delicious exercise in audience-baiting.”

“In Fincher’s hands, that smart but arguably undisciplined story becomes something even wilder and yet perversely also more controlled – a neo-noir thriller turned on its blood-spattered head,” Collin says. 

 The Guardian’s Xan Brooks also heaped praise on the director.

“All credit to director David Fincher, who appears to take an unholy delight in tugging the rug and springing the traps. His film shoves us so forcefully past the plot’s mounting implausibilities that we barely have the time to register one crime before we’re on to the next. That’s the way to do it,” Xan says.

Can’t wait to hear what Margaret and David have to say.

Gone Girl is released in Australian cinemas on October 2, 2014.

Read it before you see it! Gone Girl is the #1 New York Times Bestseller. Buy it here.

It is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media-as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents, the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behaviour. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter-but is he really a killer?