An unremitting and wondrously directed causality thriller, a film with ample attention to both character and narrative that is hard not to get excited about.

Rating: 8/10 (24 October 2011)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the adaptation of the first of three novels in a literary franchise penned by Swedish author Stieg Larsson; a recent series of books which went on to garner domestic, and later international, responses of an highly affectionate sort. Their reputation, or aura, appears only to have intensified following Larsson's own unfortunate passing in 2004 at the age of 50; a tragic happening that saw the series remain stagnant for a few years until reaching the stage of filmic pre-production brought about by joint-Swedish and Danish companies. As each book was adapted into a film, and consequently did the rounds at European festival circuits as well as multiplex cinemas alike, the staying power of the whole franchise has escalated – the effect of these numerous things totalling up and resulting in the much more recent announcement, begrudgingly to most, that accomplished American director David Fincher will be reworking them in the English language. This initial adaptation more than makes the grade, the film an electrifying and inspiring slice of cause and effect thriller film-making; a story all-at-once brutally but brilliantly fleshed out from twisting, turning and often sordid foundations into a cut-and-dry piece we are behind every step of the way.
If, in the franchise, there is this overall sense of danger intensification with each new title (the beginning with a titular "girl" and her dragon tattoo spilling out into that same titular girl and her consequent "Playing with Fire" which further still leads onto a subsequent "Kicking" of a "Hornet's Nest"), then so too is there such a sense as to the general well-being of the central characters in this first film. The film arrives on account of Danish director Niels Arden Oplev , a man working from a screenplay by his Danish colleagues in Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg. It is driven by Swedish performers from an original Swedish text - this sense of two sets of varying people, from differing nations or otherwise, coming together and working towards one goal additionally prominent throughout the piece. Our two leads, a tall and somewhat spindly 24 year old female hacker/surveillance expert named Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, and her eventual ally Mikael Blomkvist (Nyqvist), a disgraced but ultimately innocent middle-aged man, are two people whose binary oppositions to one another are plentiful, but their forging of a team and taking on the elements epitomising much of the behind the camera camaraderie.
Lisbeth cuts an odd figure, a shaggy looking young woman with piercings over most of her face; spiked black hair and similarly toned makeup. She spies on Blomkvist on account of a security firm whom want tabs kept on him, a journalist with a Stockholm magazine who finds himself six months away from a jail term for loosing a libel case on a powerful domestic businessman. Lisbeth comes across as a post-modern spin on the old private eye character from decades old. Alone, wry and facing imposing odds in a brooding city locale, we observe her treading a fine line between the moral course and the righteous one never really knowing what to think of her. Like private investigators of old, she watches another human being in the only fashion you'd expect for this day and age: via illegal access to their laptop and SMS in-boxes - all before being caught up in a wider web of smut and danger that she didn't initially envisage.
In spite of his initial troubles with the law, Blomkvist is a character the film constructs as homely and friendly; an alluding to innocence through time spent at home with a large, loving group of close friends at a Christmas function. In tandem with this, Nyqvist delivers the subtly disparaged reactions required to have us tempted into siding with him when required as he stands in the street with the news coverage of his case's results all around him. Prior to his sentence taking effect, he is given a job by a company tycoon named Henrik Vanger (Taube); a job that sees him charged with finding a certain Harriet, Henrik's niece, who vanished as a young girl nearly forty years ago. Where Lisbeth cuts a dash as a 21st Century private eye, Blomkvist will go on to epitomise a more classical breed of private investigator; a man of fair age granted that grizzled look and forced out and about into a sea of investigation and logical deduction. In the vein of an American film noir from yester-year, this lead must get the low-down on a specific person who has gone missing.
The body of the film is the two of them working together, a happening born out of Lisbeth's independent attitude to down-tools at her end and contact him over something he's missed in the disappearance. Around their coming together lies a delicate, intricate character study on top of a diligent thriller narrative which keeps on going and keeps working as well as it does. Lisbeth is established to despise men with the men in her life for the best part of the opening half an hour being slimy, grotesque and exploitative. The realisation of her Misandric attitudes, more broadly linked to a past tragedy in life, is wonderfully inserted into the meat of the film's investigative strand; her coming into contact with Blomkvist the bonding with a male specimen that is kind, understanding and is ultimately an individual doing what he's doing for the greater good of another female. Together, they battle what essentially transpires to be a bone-chilling right-wing force of misogyny. The film is an exciting, diligent thriller; a film with an intelligent character study and a cracking narrative always asking us to keep up to its speed, the likes of which it is difficult not to whole heartedly recommend.