THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009)
D: Niels Arden Oplev ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre,
Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Haber, Ingvar Hirdwall
A journalist facing a prison term for libel and a punk computer hacker with some bad personal demons team up to investigate an unsolved murder case from 40 years ago. A dark and often disturbing Swedish thriller based on Stieg Larsson's zillion-copy bestseller. The material might be pulp, but it's stylish, irresistible pulp, hard to turn away from, even when its characters are just drinking coffee (which they do a lot), or when real bad things are happening (and believe me, bad things happen). Nyqvist, playing star magazine writer Mikael Blomqvist, has the weary, seen-it-all look of a reporter who has lived for years on deadlines and adrenalin, knows a good story when he sees one, and knows how to get the facts to tell it. As the pierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, Rapace may or may not be the girl Larsson had in mind, but she can't be too far off. A chain-smoking snarl in jeans and black leather, Salander's one of the least forgettable characters in recent fiction, brilliant, inscrutable, pathologically antisocial and seriously fucked up, and Rapace doesn't miss any of that. Like Larsson's book, the film is about its characters as much as the story they're in, and it leaves you feeling glad to have made their acquaintance, with two sequels based on other Larsson novels still to come.
