10 Movies That DEMAND Your Attention Immediately

David Fincher sure knows how to open a movie, and while it's certainly not his best film overall, Gone Girl might have the strongest and most distinctive, attention-grabbing opening of any Fincher joint.

The film opens on a seemingly benign shot of the back of Amy Dunne's (Rosamund Pike) head, which is quickly lent context from narration by her husband Nick (Ben Affleck), who pictures "cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers."

In another movie, such a declaration might not seem quite so sinister or literal-minded, but in a film about Amy's disappearance and Nick's possible complicity, it immediately gets audiences edgy and anxious.

As Nick strokes Amy's head, she turns to him and stares a hole through him, the precise meaning ambiguous but generating an undeniably discomforting mood from the outset.

Nothing is more immediately compelling to viewers than the human face - on a basic, primeval level we are hard-wired to scan a person's face for meaning, and so the second Amy turns around, Fincher's got us in the palm of his hand.

Brilliantly, Fincher also bookends the film with an extremely similar shot of Amy, albeit this time informed by, well, the movie's many, many messed up events.