Gone Girl goofs

The story is set in 2012, yet when officers are clearing items from the woodshed behind Margo's house they mention a TaylorMade golf club reportedly owned by Nick. That particular model of club wasn’t introduced until late 2013.

The apparent contradictions about Nick's whereabouts at the time of Amy's disappearance are not necessarily contradictions so much as examples of poor explanation. Although he states he went to Sawyer Beach while viewers see him later at The Bar, he could quite plausibly have been at Sawyer Beach first and then visited The Bar. It is also possible he was untruthful about being at Sawyer Beach (as he is in the novel). While there is, admittedly, an inconsistency in Nick's account, it owes more to an unreliable character (or simply weak writing) than to a genuine error.

The blood on Amy, resulting from her killing of Desi, varies between scenes.

Having killed Desi Collings, Amy is smeared with blood up to her throat. Yet when she is treated in hospital after returning to Nick, there is still blood on her throat.

The colour of the blood from the slashing of Desi's neck was too dark, even if it were merely venous blood from the jugular vein. The force of the cut would almost certainly have severed the carotid artery, and blood from a relatively young heart would have been bright red. Blood that dark is more typical of a wound to the liver.

When Amy holds a press conference in the hospital after her return, she is shown wearing a clean hospital gown, yet her neck and body remain covered in Desi's blood. In reality, once the police had collected whatever they required for forensic analysis and before she was issued fresh clothing, she would almost certainly have been cleaned up or allowed to shower prior to putting on a clean gown.

At no point, not even in passing, do the police entertain the notion that Amy might simply have run away — a clear and significant oversight on their part. However, that omission is intentional: one of the main points Amy raises on her return is the poor way the police handled the investigation. The film itself also functions as a commentary on how the media and the police deal with cases of this kind. Their failure to consider that Amy may have fled is central to that critique.

Leading Nick and Margo straight to the shed would not have revealed Amy's scheme. There was nowhere in the shed to conceal the items, and attempting to hide or destroy them would have only further implicated Nick and/or Margo — it could also have transferred their fingerprints onto the evidence. Directing Nick (and Margo) to the shed was therefore a form of taunting: Nick had neither the time nor the means to deal with it, and reporting the discovery to the police would have seemed implausible, since the clues Amy left are too elusive and confusing to stand up as admissible evidence.

Getting a judge to approve a search warrant for the woodshed based solely on a single anonymous tip would be highly unlikely; an anonymous report of "suspicious activity" typically does not amount to sufficient evidence. That said, in this specific situation obtaining a warrant would probably be relatively straightforward. An anonymous tip referring to a detached outbuilding at a suspect’s relative’s home, situated very near the crime scene, and where the shed’s ownership, location and size (large enough to conceal a person or body) bear directly on a high‑profile abduction and murder investigation, would likely convince most judges. Time would be critical, since it was unknown whether Amy was alive or deceased, and a judge would almost certainly take that urgency into account. In nearly every instance of these circumstances it would be permitted.

Amy allegedly bled heavily on the kitchen floor. Later, however, no-one seems to ask what sort of wound could have produced such a volume of blood.

When Amy is treated in hospital after returning to Nick, the doctors who examined her for signs of sexual assault and internal bleeding would have readily recognised that there were no indications of either pregnancy or a miscarriage. A miscarriage left untreated can potentially lead to an infection, so a doctor would almost certainly check for evidence of one.

When the FBI reviewed the surveillance footage from Desi's holiday home, even if she had managed to avoid the cameras while there, they ought to have realised that she arrived at the property with Desi of her own accord and she wasn't restrained, as she was unaware of the cameras at the time.

Amy takes a urine specimen from Noelle Hawthorne, who is well advanced in her pregnancy, in order to demonstrate that she herself is pregnant. However, Amy is supposedly only six weeks' pregnant, and the results of urine tests would be noticeably different between a woman at six weeks and one far along in pregnancy.

Part of Amy's plan to frame Nick hinged on her bleeding out on the kitchen floor — an amount of blood she would not have survived. Her blood pressure would have dropped to a dangerously low level, and even if she had lived it would have taken at least a day for her body to replace all the lost blood; yet she is shown immediately after tidying up the scene, which is impossible after losing over three units of blood. Her scheme would very likely have resulted in an unintended suicide.

Ink can be forensically analysed. While not entirely precise, it could still indicate the diary wasn't composed over several years but within a considerably shorter span.

The investigation had not reached a stage where such an idea would have occurred to them. By the time the case might have gone to trial it would have surfaced, but by then she had returned and the embarrassment of mishandling the matter effectively closed off further lines of inquiry. Moreover, the diary could have been written over a period of up to 18 months. Nick said the affair had lasted one and a half years, which might reasonably correspond to 16-20 months — people commonly round time spans this way. Her disappearance is dated 5 July. It is never clarified how long she had known about the affair, but in her recollection she remembers snow falling; in Missouri snowfall typically occurs from November through February, rarely into March, which suggests she knew of it at least five to eight months earlier, and possibly as long as 18 or 19 months. And because ink analysis is not completely reliable, one could question whether it would be able to determine the ink's age if, for example, she had been using a nine-year-old pen for entries written in 2005. Old pens do exist and some still write.

It is highly unlikely Amy could have moved a 65" Sony television into the woodshed entirely on her own, and the police apparently made no attempt to question the sales staff or delivery personnel responsible for the items kept there. Equally odd is that nobody reported any unusual activity at the woodshed — shifting such a set would have required either several trips or a removal van with helpers.

Most couriers simply leave parcels on the doorstep and occasionally take a photograph, with no human interaction, so speaking to delivery drivers would probably have yielded only delivery times and order details. She appears to have plotted her revenge over several months rather than days: the opening date is 5 July and her recollection of discovering the affair happens in winter (snow falling), which places the timeframe at roughly five to eight months (Missouri normally has snow from November to February). It is not strange for two or three dozen parcels to arrive at a house over the course of several months. Alternatively, she could have moved a large TV to the shed using a sack truck, which she may have ordered before the other parcels, given her tendency to plan ahead.

The investigation appears to be halted abruptly when Amy is found, and during her questioning at the hospital she feigns distress, so all enquiries — including those crucial to placing Desi at the scene — are dropped and never resumed. The case is declared closed on the strength of Amy's account alone, although there are several high-profile real-life examples where that did not happen and markedly different conclusions were reached (for instance, Jennifer Wilbanks, the 'runaway bride' who fled in 2005 and staged her own abduction).

The couple who rob Amy are aware she is disguised and hiding from something.

They would surely recognise that the woman featured on television was the very same woman in their company. And the first thing they would do, having just assaulted and robbed her, would be to call the police.

Towards the end, when the police take Nick and Amy home, they are seated in the rear of the police vehicle. When it pulls up, Nick opens his door and steps out, walking round to open the door for Amy. The rear doors of police vehicles cannot be opened from the inside.