Gone Girl

Fincher's film, screenplay by Gillian Flynn adapting her own novel, which is why it keeps the structural trick most adaptations would flatten: the alternating his-and-hers narration, and the mid-book reveal that Amy's diary is a fabrication written to be found. The film reproduces that with voiceover and a hard tonal break at the reveal. The ending is the novel's, not a softened one, which was widely expected to change and did not.

Kurosawa's film put a device into general circulation that had no name before it and has carried his title ever since: the same events recounted by people whose accounts cannot all be true, with no authorial version offered to settle it. Gone Girl runs it as a two-hander. Amy's diary is a complete, coherent and false account of the marriage, set against Nick's; the film withholds the reconciliation for an hour and then reveals that one narrator built hers to be found. Filed MEDIUM, and the honest framing is that this is a technique's descent rather than a film's: Flynn is working in a form Rashomon named, not adapting Kurosawa.