In david fincher’s Gone Girl, the opening sequence starts quietly enough. We are in an affluent (but not too swanky) suburb early in the morning. Nothing stirs except the wildlife, raccoons or opossums, even the odd deer, wandering the lawns, nosing at the bins. The effect, though, is not so much Arcadian as sinister. As a director, Fincher has previous form as a tension builder, from the twisting, macabre police thriller Se7en or the psychological whodunit Fight Club, to Zodiac (based on a series of killings in the San Francisco area in the 1960s and 1970s), to the English-language adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He knows how to set up a man (or woman) hunt, to lay clues and false trails. With Gone Girl he was dealing with the international best-selling novel by Gill