Watch: David Fincher’s Eternal Return in ‘Gone Girl’: A Video Essay

Ah, the eternal return. History repeats itself. We think we change, but we don’t. You think someone may surprise you with unpredictable behavior–and then they don’t. Gone Girl is a perfect film to demonstrate this historical and, at bottom, psychological tendency; the most consistent thing about both Nick Dunne and Amy Dunne is their duplicitousness, and we keep seeing it over, and over, and over again throughout the film. And, as Jop Leuven points out in this brief but pointed video essay, the film’s visual structure mirrors this repetition; we see the same shots, with slight variations, repeated from the beginning to the end of the film. Amy lying on a pillow. Nick standing in front of a picture of his wife. Amy opening a door with mock innocence. And onwards. David Fincher is a master explorer of the works he adapts; he gets under the hood, assesses their potential, and, after a little bit of tinkering, takes us through them with such brio that the work he is adapting is utterly transformed. His adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant novel is no exception, as this video proves.