The main character in Gone Girl, the new film from director David Fincher, is beautiful, smart and altogether duplicitous, running effortless rings around her cheating husband. Many viewers might be forgiven for regarding frosty Amy Dunne as a potential villainess. For actor Rosamund Pike, however, the woman is a new kind of screen heroine.
"My reaction to her goes beyond like or dislike – I understand her," Pike told reporters as Gone Girl premiered at the 52nd New York film festival. "In other films, a strong female character is only shown as being strong because she's like a man. But the thing about Amy is that she could never have been a man. She's purely female. People don't like me saying that, but it's true."
Based on the bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl casts the British actor opposite Ben Affleck as a married couple in meltdown, pitting Amy's cool panache against her husband's boorish blundering.
Flynn said: "I see Amy as someone who knows all the tropes and the stories about being a woman and is not afraid to use those stories to get her own way. She's having it all. She's a modern woman. But she's made of a bundle of stories that she's pulled together. And at the centre, she's nothing."
Previously regarded as a cinephile's backwater, the New York film festival caught experts by surprise with the strength of this year's line-up. Gone Girl is the first of three high-profile titles to receive its world premiere in Manhattan. It will be followed by the first showing of Paul Thomas Anderson's crime drama Inherent Vice and Citizenfour, a documentary on the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Elsewhere, the festival provides a US launch pad for pictures that have already debuted at Cannes and Berlin. These include Mike Leigh's acclaimed period biopic Mr Turner and Bennett Miller's wrestling drama Foxcatcher and Olivier Assayas's backstage melodrama Clouds of Sils Maria, which stars Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche. Before the opening night ceremony, festival director Kent Jones hailed the line-up's balance of Hollywood glamour and art-house appeal, describing it as a festival "for film lovers of all stripes and all levels of knowledge".
Early indications suggest that the mix is working, as a line of delegates snaked around the block outside the Gone Girl premiere. Fincher's thriller is already exciting rave reviews and looks set to spark flurried debate over its fractious take on modern-day marriage. It's a film that implicitly invites the audience to pick a side. Should they support the chilly, snobbish Amy, whose disappearance sparks a media witch-hunt, or the shifty, feckless Nick, who is sleeping with his student? "It's a film that strips back and reveals the differences between men and women," Affleck told reporters.
Like Pike, Affleck admitted to feeling a grudging affinity with the character he plays. "You can't play someone if you think he's a dick," he explained. "My job was to empathise with Nick as much as I could. But it's interesting: men and women seem to have very different reactions to the character. Women ask, 'What was it like playing such a dick?'. Men just shrug and say, 'Well, yeah'."
The 52nd New York film festival runs until 12 October.
• This article was amended on Saturday 27 September 2014 to remove a spoiler
