Eh? NPH wasn’t a bad guy.
Desi was rather possessive of her. I thought she was going to be trapped in his lake house.
And when she was watching the camera views, she was, I assume, determining where she was and was not on camera, so that she could fake being held prisoner. Was she also determining how long the security system kept the recordings? Because surely the recording of her arriving at the house would show her voluntarily entering the house.
And I thought it odd that she met him in the casino, given how many cameras there are in such places.
Yes, in the book, it’s much more obvious, but he’s pretty creepy. He’s also pretty obsessed with making sure she gets back to looking attractive (in the movie, he gets her makeup and hair dye so she can go back to looking like herself, but in the book I think he’s controlling about what she eats so she’ll lose weight also).
I was wondering that, too. Another big weakness for me was that the police (other than Rhonda) didn’t seem to see any of the glaring holes in her story (the convenient non-answer when she’s asked why she bought a gun, etc.).
I presumed she figured out how to wipe any footage that didn’t support her story… or she counted on the police not looking too closely, given her public acclaim as a plucky survivor and their embarrassment over having seemed to rush to judgment against Nick.
That’s where the story really lost a whole lot of plausibility for me.
So Desi came in and cleaned up all the blood? And where did all that blood come from?
That relates to what I really hated about the movie - the ending. Sure, a lack of resolution can be great for some stories. This isn’t one of them. There is nothing particularly deep going on here. It’s a who dunnit with a bit of a twist. For me, the ending was a writer’s cop out, because writing a satisfying ending to a story like this can be hard.
I think she just took a story, gave it a twist and then another and then kind of just gave up.
Yes, that was odd. I think this is something else the book explains–can’t remember why, but book Amy had an explanation. But the film didn’t even try, and it should have.
Amy cleaned up the blood herself – “poorly, just like a man would do.”
But this leads to another hole in her story. She doesn’t have any wounds consistent with losing a lot of blood on her kitchen floor.
My initial reaction to the movie was that I was dazzled, and surprised by some (not all) of the plot twists. But as I ponder it, I’m troubled by the plot.
Why don’t the police dig deeper into Amy’s weak story? Det Boney was already shooting holes in it at her first interview.
Why does Amy go back? Why doesn’t she just stay with NPH – he’s rich, and she (and Nick) are broke. Was she supposed to be dazzled by Nick’s performance on CNN? (At this point, she seems to switch from sociopath to psychopath).
Why does Nick stay with her? Why doesn’t he just walk away?
(Thanks for clearing up the question of paternity – the sperm bank, so she really is pregnant and the baby really is Nick’s.)
Yeah, but what Barb and Freud meant was — It’s Amy’s story that Desi kidnapped her from her living room, which implies that he cleaned up all the blood. And, apparently, they’re not buying it.
IIRC, more than a month went by before she came home. Wounds could have healed.
The police no longer had the case, the FBI did. And, as Boney said, they have a media-ready story complete with a villain who’s already dead, so they’re not going to push things any further.
Two reasons, and you got one of them. When she saw Nick on TV, she got in into her head that he had changed, and now the two of them could be the perfect couple. (Keep in mind that Amy is a total nut job.)
The second reason was emphasized more strongly in the book, but present in the movie as well. Desi was keeping her prisoner. He never let her leave the lake house. I think that in the book, she was there for several weeks before she’d finally had enough.
<pedant>
The two words mean exactly the same thing.
</pedant>
You got it.
Watching the movie without having read the book, I was assuming that the pregnancy was due to Desi.
So, Amy had a stash of Nick’s baby batter that she saved somewhere, somehow, and impregnated herself with it after returning? :dubious:
You’re probably right, about sociopath/psychopath. But her motivation clicked drastically in a different direction. First, she was motivated by self-preservation and revenge: I’m outta here and Nick’s goin’ down (which I inelegantly defined as sociopathic). Then one viewing of Nick on TV, and she’s obsessed with being the perfect couple (psycho).
I read the book last week on vacation and then saw the movie yesterday, so the book was (is) still fresh in my mind. I would have liked to have seen the movie with someone who hadn’t read the book, to gauge the element of surprise in the big plot twists. As it was, there was an audible gasp in the theater when the credits began - people couldn’t believe it just ended there.
In the book, Amy makes a deep cut in her arm to create the blood in the kitchen. She’s much more surgical about it in the movie. But I don’t recall her explaining why Desi would have mopped up the blood and staged a kidnapping in the living room.
I loved about 85% of the book but was very disappointed with the ending. It seemed to me that the movie did a pretty good job at compressing it into a comprehensible film, but I’m looking forward to hearing from more folks who saw it without having read the book first.
Yep. It has to be otherwise her statement to Nick that she’d do all the tests he wanted doesn’t make sense.
An unpleasant movie with unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other. I feel sad there’s now space in my brain set aside to remember this movie.
That would be me.
Not at all surprised that Amy staged her own death.
I was surprised when Nick’s girlfriend showed up; but if I’d remembered that the story was inspired by the Scott Peterson case, I wouldn’t have been.
I was very surprised that Amy murdered Desi – I thought it was going to be the other way around.
Surprised (and disappointed) that Amy returns to Nick - see my comments above.
Never read the book. I assumed from the start that she either engineered the disappearance herself for reasons to be explained as the film progressed or as part of a team that wanted to get at Nick for reasons to be explained, yada yada yada.
Honestly, and this is probably more a reflection of my taste than a criticism of the movie, but I’d have preferred a movie about psychotic Amy’s web of deceit being unravelled by a plucky no-nonsense southern detective marching stolidly towards truth. Which writing it out, sounds like I want Fargo but in Missouri.
As a counterpoint to jsc, I figured from the moment they met at the casino, she was looking to fuck Desi up at the soonest opportunity. I figured her initial plan was to get cash or fenceable goods and disappear again ASAP but the presence of the cameras + his immediate jump to controlling behavior + nick’s speech meant he had to die.
They had gone to a fertility clinic and the clinic had stored Nick’s sperm.
I think my reaction was very similar to this. I found my enjoyment of the movie - the tension and excitement - diminished markedly when they revealed Amy alive and fine driving along. It dropped again when she was robbed and had to alter her plans.
But there had been, some time preceding Amy’s disappearance, the letter stating that they were going to destroy his samples, right?
Yes, unless Nick or Amy informed them to keep it which she did but led him to believe she hadn’t. It’s a remarkable bit of prescience given her original plan.
She seemed to me to be primarily driven by a deranged malignant narcissism. There’s no “self-preservation” element in her original plan. In the book, at least, her original end goal is to kill herself after watching Nick suffer from afar, to ensure her punishment of him is complete. So in that sense it literally wasn’t about self-preservation. But also, he didn’t actually do anything to her except lose interest and cheat on her with a younger woman.
If she was interested in self-preservation she could’ve just divorced him like countless other spouses who’ve been cheated on. Why go to such lengths, when thousands of people cheat on their spouses every day? Because she had a grandiose self image of herself as an amazing woman, and being cheated on was too much for her ego to take.
Her going back to him didn’t seem completely believable to me, but she was more interested in forcing him to follow through on his promise to spend his life groveling and making up to her than in being a “perfect couple”.
Both her original plan and returning seemed primarily motivated to maintain her self-belief that she was an amazingly grand person who was better and smarter than everyone else.
I saw the movie this weekend having never read the book and knowing nothing about the plot except that it concerned a woman’s disappearance, which you pretty much get from the title.
God, it was a mixed bag. On the good side: some excellent performances. Rosamund Pike is going to get all the glory, but Ben Affleck arguably had a harder role and he performed it brilliantly. I also loved the actress who played his twin sister. David Fincher’s direction was great, and that, combined with the story, basically kept me entertained for the full 2 1/2 hours.
But even as I was entertained I kept getting irritated. Over and over the characters seemed to be doing things not for any real, organic reason, but simply because the plot demanded it.
First, I just didn’t believe Amy’s transition to hating Nick to the point that she wanted him to die. The scenes from their early relationship (which we’re supposed to believe are true) show her as an intelligent, kind, funny, loving, sensible person. The movie would have been stronger if there had been some clouds on the horizon, some indication that she had this horrible dark side. But nope - there was nothing.
Fine - we don’t get to see that. So she hatches her crazy plot, an integral part of which is that she kill herself. Now, even though she’s an extremely methodical person who has been planning all of this for a long time, when it comes down to it…eh, she decides suicide isn’t the way to go. Why? We don’t even see her attempt it. And even though she’s brought along some money, it’s hardly enough to keep her going indefinitely.
Speaking of the money, Greta robbing her was another thing that was completely out of left field. Greta is portrayed as a sympathetic, supportive friend…until the plot decides that it would be cool for her to rob and beat Amy, and so, she does.
Then there’s the question of why Amy didn’t stay with Desi Collings. Some people mentioned that he’s considered a bad guy in the book, but he’s a kind, intelligent character in the movie, and seems to have everything Amy could want. But Amy is swayed to go back to Nick just by seeing him on TV? Again - not believable.
As for Nick: why not tell the police about the stuff in the woodshed? They already know about the anniversary clues and the treasure hunt, and the electronic dog and golf clubs and all that are clearly arranged as presents, complete with a new card in Amy’s handwriting. Why on earth wouldn’t he point it out to the cops so as to explain the mysterious purchases?
Also, I frankly didn’t believe that Nick would figure out that Amy was faking her own death. Remember, at this point he doesn’t have any idea that she faked being raped in high school and faked being stalked by Desi. Faking one’s own death is so unusual and implausible I couldn’t believe he would figure it out so easily. I also didn’t believe that Tyler Perry’s character would believe in the story so readily, either. (Margo’s belief made sense - she had to hang on to any theory that would exonerate her brother.)
And on and on. Maybe some of these things made sense in the book, and maybe people can explain them to me. But judging the movie purely on its own terms, these random twists really detracted from my overall enjoyment of the film.
By the way, anyone who’s seen the 1945 movie *Leave Her to Heaven *will recognize this plot element as a direct steal.