The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Niels Arden Oplev

Perhaps because I know Sweden mostly as the home of Ingmar Bergman and Let the Right One In, I was expecting something different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It shapes up as an old-fashioned Agatha Christie-style mystery about two dogged, mismatched detectives going through a cold case to uncover hidden family secrets and a killer still on the loose; but for the graphic sexuality and macabre violence it would be at home on Masterpiece Theater. At first I was disappointed at its conventional nature, but then I went with the flow. I like Masterpiece Theater.

It opens with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist falsely convicted of using forged evidence to libel businessman Hans-Erik Wennerström (Stefan Sauk). He’s sentenced to three months in jail but has six months before he must serve his time. In the interim, he’s hired by wealthy magnate Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who wants to get to the bottom of the disappearance of his niece Harriet forty years ago. The Vanger family is overburdened with dark secrets, and Henrik thinks one of them is her killer.

Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the title character, joins the case from afar. She’s hired by Henrik to investigate Mikael, to find out whether the beleaguered journalist is worth his time, but after her vetting is done she persists, hacking into Mikael’s hard drive and providing a vital clue that prompts Mikael to officially bring her on to the case. It is when they begin working together that the film begins to resemble a more traditional detective story; there’s even a scene where one of them scours records in a basement archive and makes a crucial discovery in the nick of time.

Lisbeth is interesting the moment we meet her, and hard to miss. Director Niels Arden Oplev introduces her in a corporate office where the suits and ties markedly contrast with her multiple piercings and goth-black hair, eyeliner, and attire. She’s an outsider, but a tough and savvy one, able to make a living and protect herself.

There is a subplot that demonstrates Lisbeth’s resilience, though apart from that it doesn’t entirely work. She must report to a probation officer for reasons that become clearer over time, and her latest is corrupt, exploiting his authority to procure sexual favors. He’s not subtle about it; in their first meeting, he asks about her sexual history and preferred positions. He’s the kind of twisted movie pervert who makes a special point of his twisted perversion, and that’s a problem for two reasons: (1) because this probation officer in the real world might have had trouble avoiding consequence for so long with such up-front lechery; and (2) because playing up his mustache-twirling villainy sensationalizes the violence in a way that exploits the exploitation, turning it into spectacle. Do such acts really need to be played up for effect?

A “romance” develops between Lisbeth and Mikael, and I put “romance” in quotes because it doesn’t really play like one, though it’s not clear whether Oplev, screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, or the author of the popular source novel (which I haven’t read), Stieg Larsson, intend it to. What is clear is that Lisbeth is a traumatized but self-possessed young woman, whose assault at the hands of the probation officer doesn’t seem to have been her first, and whose sexual protocols now revolve around control. Their first encounter is a surprise to Mikael and the audience alike. Rapace, in her gritty, brittle performance, suggests no affection or even lust. For her, the sex is an assertion of physical and emotional dominance, perhaps even a preemptive strike against an anticipated attack. Whether they’re romantically compatible I greatly doubt, but the film plays it ambiguously.

The director makes great use of old photos, which are among my favorite devices in cold-case stories like this one. There’s an inherent mystery in them; they capture a moment in time, but there’s an unknown world outside the frame, and before and after it, and speculating about their hidden context makes them ominous. There is an excellent sequence where Mikael discovers an old roll of film from a newspaper archive; he digitally scans the images, and they were shot in such quick succession that they play like a flip book — an eerie animated record of a few short moments that might be the key to solving the crime.

The film can’t resist the temptation of a silly Talking Killer scene, that familiar device defined in Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary as the moment when the killer has our hero right where he wants him, only to talk and talk and talk about his fiendish plot, giving the hero enough time to escape or be rescued. The point of such scenes is not to give the hero time to escape — the screenwriter can rescue the protagonist whenever he wants — but to give the killer time to deliver exposition the film has no other opportunity to reveal. These scenes stand out negatively because they force the characters to step outside of themselves to perform the function of the screenplay.

It’s during such plot-intensive moments that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is least effective. But then you have dark, observant character scenes like Lisbeth witnessing a car accident and choosing a course of action. Afterwards, she visits someone she hasn’t seen in years and we learn more about a crime she committed in her youth. I suspect more details are forthcoming; Stieg Larsson wrote two sequels, both of which have been made into films that were released throughout Europe last fall and winter and are expected to hit the United States this fall. I look forward to the mysteries they contain, but more so I look forward to seeing the girl who solves them.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: