But above all, it's a delicious exercise in audience-baiting: what begins as a he-said, she-said story of mounting, murderous suspense, lurches at its fulcrum into the kind of hot mess Brian De Palma might have cooked up 20 years ago in his attic. Reports that Flynn had, while writing the screenplay, dramatically reworked her original ending, are accurate, but only after a fashion. The plot is essentially unchanged, but every screw has been tightened, and a new confrontation scene delivers a brutal, yet agonisingly un-final, showdown.

The film begins cryptically, close to that end-point, before looping back to the morning of Amy’s disappearance from the home she shares with her husband Nick, brilliantly played by Ben Affleck as a man who has finally realised his life will never quite live up to the promise of his jawline. This is recession-era America, old and tired, and even the dawn inching over the shuttered shops looks stale.

We learn that Nick and Amy lost their New York-based writing jobs in the downturn, now he and his twin sister Margot (Carrie Coon) run a bar in the town where he grew up, while she sits at home, gathering dust.

These scenes are stern and crisp, underscored not with music, but the dust-dry buzz of air-conditioning and fluorescent light. We hear it when Nick comes home to find the living room furniture turned upside down and his wife of five years nowhere to be seen – and again when he’s taken in for questioning by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), who wonders if there’s more to this man than meets her already sceptical eye.

Soon, though, via an entry in Amy’s diary, the film flashes back to the couple’s first meeting at a chichi New York party. The voluptuous, Angelo Badalamenti-ish score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, aches and swells, while Amy and Nick’s conversation snaps along to a seductive, screwball beat. Afterwards, they go walking arm in arm through the city at night, when they’re suddenly enveloped by clouds of icing sugar that come billowing out of a baker’s window. They stop and share a sweetened kiss in the tawny moonlight. The past, for these two, looks like a sugar storm.

The film shuttles between these two time periods, and Fincher’s masterstroke is in making neither ring entirely true: the director is so adept at crafting concretely plausible fictions, he knows exactly which details to tweak to throw the balance slightly off.

In the present, Amy is nowhere to be seen. In the past, she’s everywhere. Pike, who’s so often quietly admirable in films of varying quality, has waited more than a decade for a role this juicy, but what amazes you is how methodically she seizes on it: not with the hungry pounce and rip of a wild cat, but the rhythmic constrictions of an anaconda. Amy is the best thing Pike has ever done: her performance is taut and poised, and at times almost masque-like. While her diary voiceovers swoon with emotion, her face gives you almost nothing.

It’s possible that Amy’s darker monologues may induce in female viewers the same double squirm felt by men listening to Edward Norton’s Fight Club voiceover: the shock that someone would ever dare to say such things out loud, coupled with a pit-of-the-stomach throb of recognition. There is a key speech in the novel in which Amy describes the fate of the "cool girl" – the archetypal sexy girlfriend who morphs, unbidden, into a pliant wife — that Pike delivers with a note of venomous triumph that makes you want to cheer.

The revealing of Amy’s fate, which takes place not at the end of the film but at its centre, with a mad magician’s flourish, is expertly handled, re-energising the plot while ushering in some fun new characters, not least of all Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s WASP-y ex-lover and Tyler Perry as a grandstanding lawyer. And for all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness.