David Fincher is a filmmaker who specializes in the spooky, focuses our fear and dances calmly with our delusions. He’s an orator of awe and a modern-day Hitchcock.

He’s comfortable with back-stabbing, socio political narratives such as “The Social Network”, but a virtual savant when he’s posed with creating a stewing, winding narrative that makes you sick to your stomach when the film reaches its apex.

His narrative in “Gone Girl” simply bobs along for the first hour and a half of the film, and just as you become restless, it serves you plot twists to fend off disinterest.

Though revealing which way he leans in “Gone Girl” would be giving away specific plot points that would spoil the film, I can say that Fincher takes on the much maligned trope of the femme fatale. In this particular sense, the trope is presented as the sloppily-written Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike).

Amy is the focal point of a three-act film in which her sometimes apathetic, sometimes apoplectic husband Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) becomes the main suspect of a murder investigation.

Nick begins the day of his fifth wedding anniversary by making a cup of coffee, retrieving the newspaper from his front yard as he gazes into the distance (in an almost foreshadowing manner), and grabbing a drink at The Bar that he co-owns with his twin sister Margo.

He drinks hard liquor as he laments his and his wife Amy’s deteriorating relationship. As Margo dispenses her sarcastic but warm sisterly advice, the phone rings and Nick is informed by a neighbor that his cat is outside in the front yard.

Nick comes home to his front door ajar, his living room in shambles and his wife gone.

“Gone Girl” tries to hold strong to the book, authored by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), in the way it satirizes marriage and relationships – Amy says men expect too much from women, Nick says he’s tired of being picked apart by women – but Fincher’s style just rings phony when put to this sort of source material.

His hard-nosed, unapologetic noir film style that made his “what’s in the box” scene from “Se7en” so appalling doesn’t lend itself to the melodrama/dramedy type film Flynn had envisioned.

Pike tries to score whenever the script allows her to, but she’s nearly rendered a non-character as a result of being constantly undermined by the pro-male script. Affleck rises above the script that ultimately tips in his favor, however, and plays Nick Dunne with a sympathetic, beaten and somewhat annoyed demeanor that makes this whodunit tale churn.

Its suspense throughout is what you’ve come to expect from Fincher. But unlike “The Social Network” and “Se7en,” it’s a clunky film that you don’t believe he’s in complete control of. Despite this less-than-stellar review, “Gone Girl” is still a successful film. Although after its ambivalent ending you’re left thinking about what could have been.

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