The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Related Content

• "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo": Rooney Mara Takes Control
  December 21, 2011
• Sweden the Pot
  April 28, 2010
• Arthouse Movie Listings February 29-March 6
  February 29, 2012
• "Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol": Tom Cruise Lives Another Day
  December 21, 2011
• Bad Girl
  July 7, 2010

More About

• Stieg Larsson
• Mikael Blomqvist
• Henrik Vanger
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Sven-Bertil Taube

Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation relies more on the mystery, but has two complex, compelling leads driving its story. Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), a disgraced investigative journalist, is asked by industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the disappearance of his niece from a family reunion forty years ago. A finite number of suspects emerge, mostly members of Vanger's hugely dysfunctional dynasty: aged Swedish Nazis, venal old aunts, creepy brothers and cousins. Blomqvist teams up with Lisbeth Salander, who is the true star of Larsson's books, a state-raised, quasi-autistic computer hacker with a horrifying past and an alarmingly black-and-white sense of morality. Played by Noomi Rapace—the real discovery here—Salander is a walking time bomb of injuries and resentments. Together they disinter the Vanger family's grotesque secrets, while somebody—a still-active serial sex-murderer, perhaps?—uses increasingly violent methods to try to stop them. An elegant contraction of the novel, discarding Blomqvist's sexual bravado and thus saving Larsson from his own worst tendencies, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoomay be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.
Sun., June 27, 2, 5:15 & 8:30 p.m.; Mon., June 28, 7:30 p.m., 2010