The title of Gone Girl refers to a woman who disappears one morning from her Missouri home.

But the story is equally concerned with another, more common kind of disappearance, of a happy marriage. The attractive, ambitious, fun-loving people both Nick and Amy Dunne fell in love with have been replaced by a reality neither had bargained for.

It's this underlying theme that makes David Fincher's adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestseller such a superior thriller. It's at once a did-he-or-didn't-he mystery, a satire on the modern media at its sensationalist worst and a sobering examination of a marriage gone awry that many may relate to - to a point - all laced with enough twists and turns to fill a dozen movies.

When Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) gets up one morning, he seems out of sorts. Visiting the bar that he owns with his sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), he bitches to her about his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) and their fifth wedding anniversary. Returning home, he finds the front door open, a coffee table smashed to pieces and his wife missing.

Amy is not just any Amy, but 'Amazing Amy', the real-life inspiration for a popular children's book character created by her parents. When the police call a press conference the parents, Amy's creepy followers and the media descend on the town. Ben's broad smile and unusually calm reaction sets everyone's suspicions alight. And despite the best efforts of Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) to give him the benefit of the doubt, the husband inevitably becomes the chief suspect.

By this time, Ben's is not the only perspective on offer, for we're now hearing the voice of Amy herself - not from the grave, not yet anyway, but from the pages of her diary. As Ben's buffeting between detectives and media occupies the present, Amy's voiceover takes us into the past, and the history of their relationship from heady courtship in New York, where they both worked as journalists, through the family tragedy and recessionary pressures that brought them to his Missouri home town, tails between their legs.

And just as Ben and his sister portray Amy as a friendless harridan, her diary entries suggest a different story.

This is just the beginning of Gone Girl, a film for which knowledge of the source is probably more significant than usual. But while a measure of delight at the jaw-dropping twists may be lost with familiarity, there's ample compensation in seeing how elegantly and mischievously the story is delivered.

Much of the effect is down to the performances, especially that of the excellent Affleck, whose study in jovial ambiguity is worthy of a Hitchcock lead. And Pike comes into her own as Amy, who is "amazing" in ways you can't imagine.

Fincher works his visual magic in moments ranging from lip-smacking romance (the new lovers caught in a snowstorm of sugar outside a night-time bakery) to startlingly choreographed violence. But most satisfaction is derived from his control of tone, embracing the comic absurdity of the media circus that descends upon the town, head-scratching mystery and some great ensemble playing.

From Se7en and The Game, through Fight Club, Zodiac and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the director has always been a dab hand at keeping us on the edge of our seats. The masterstroke here is that the moment you think the story can't twist any further is exactly the moment it offers its most twisted twist of all.