The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The new movie based on the best-selling book combines murder mystery with revenge fantasy.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a fantastic mash-up of a movie that manages to combine a murder mystery with a rape revenge film, a story about old Nazis with one about modern corporate malfeasance. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, David Fincher’s Se7en, Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, and violent revenge movies of the seventies like I Spit on Your Grave and Thriller are obvious influences for director Niels Arden Oplev. His film is not for the weak of heart, though its violence doesn’t feel the least bit exploitive.

The basic plot concerns one Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a renegade journalist who has written a damning story about an industrialist named Wennerstrom, accusing him of gun running and other crimes. But when his “sources” for the story all mysteriously dry up, Blomkvist is convicted of libel and sentenced to three months in prison.

As he waits to serve his sentence, he is offered an intriguing job by a wealthy capitalist named Henrik Vanger: the investigation of the 40-year-old disappearance and probable murder of his niece Harriet Vanger. Lundquist takes the job, slowly piecing together the story of what happened to Harriet through her diary, old photos, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia. Along the way he uncovers some rather shocking facts about the history of the Vanger family, which controls a large corporate empire and had ties to Nazism in the thirties and forties.

As Blomkvist investigates the Vangers’ past in a cottage on the remote island where Henrik Vanger lives, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a troubled and violent young computer hacker with her own dark past, investigates him in turn for a private security firm. Her jet-black hair, punk piercings, and defiant silence in the face of men she doesn’t trust (which is just about every man she meets) make her own past an interesting mystery in and of itself. She is eventually drawn into Blomkvist’s attempt to uncover the truth behind Harriet Vanger’s disappearance. Salander is victim and avenger, forced to deal with a very nasty parole officer in a shocking way. Without giving away too much, her several revenge schemes are fiercely intelligent. Copious sex and violence follow Salander’s involvement with Blomkvist, though not the histrionic sort one sees in Hollywood films.

Even though Girl is two and a half hours long, and contains numerous relatively silent scenes involving the main characters, not to mention moody pans across a mostly wintry landscape, it never fails to hold one’s attention. Its slow revelation of the mystery behind the Vanger family’s past keeps one glued to the screen.

The first two-thirds of the film, before Blomkvist has pieced together the full story, is the most intriguing given its similarity to epistemological mysteries like Blowup, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and Brian de Palma’s Blowout. Blomkvist even covers the wall of his borrowed cottage with photos of the Vanger family, including blowups of a key picture of Harriet watching a parade in 1966 just before disappearing, just as David Hemmings’ character in Blowup covers the walls of his London studio with blowups of what he thinks is a murder in a park he has unwittingly photographed. Oplev turns us into co-investigators with Blomqvist and later Salander, making us play Watson to their collective Holmes as we cinematically peer over their shoulders at the many photos, clippings, diaries, and computer screens seen in the film.

Girl is a very Swedish film, reveling in the rural landscapes of the country, and making no real attempt to pander to a North American or even European audience – all the characters are Swedish, and there are only one or two lines of English dialogue. Yet through the inventiveness of its writing, acting, and directing, it manages to penetrate the veil of the dreaded subtitle to appeal to a fairly mainstream audience on this side of the Atlantic. Or at least it should, if audiences give it a try. Girl is as good as any drama released in the past year, rivaled only by Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.