Tattooed Mist

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2010)

Somewhere along the way, the detective genre in both books and movies has drifted. In the formative period where the form was strong enough to stick, the idea was a to create an engaging puzzle. The narrative was the thing and the game was to sort out the causal agency among possibilities in a sort of quantum logic. Other than the recurring detective, characters and settings were there to color the puzzle. In fact, filling them out would reveal their inner motivations, and that had to be kept hidden.
Then I suppose in the late 70s, detective fiction became what the publicists called "psychological." The genre bumped up against the procedural. Readers lost the desires and skills required to play the simple game, so the game evolved into what I call a vocabulary of folding devices. In the process, detective storytelling started getting judged by the same rules as ordinary drama, for better or worse.
Those rules may overemphasize character definition. We have to have an absurdly sharp but easily described set of ghosts that haunt every character that matters. Mix that with Lutheran Swedish filmmaking and you end up with something like this. The mood is refined and disturbing. The camera does not probe because we expect the characters to project to us. People are damaged, seriously damaged and they spread it around themselves. Cold is the same as gloom.
I have not read the book. It is possible that the language used there is able to bridge the inner cosmos of our two detectives and the world they are discovering. Surely the matter is the same: sexual violence. (Blomkvist's situation here is not quite clear; a lover at work may have helped frame him.)
Anyway, you get two movies. Visually and tone-wise you have the heavy Bergman. There is no mystery or coherent story outside the characters. The characters are cartoons, so outside our experience that they cannot connect, only display.
The only engaging things were the stories within: the photos primarily.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.