The Exploited Sex Pistols

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2012)

I have not seen the Swedish film so cannot tell you what this does by contrast. No, I came to this after feeling spent from some recent heavy duty viewing and looking to unwind with slick pop darkness and gratuitous mystery: looking for a detective film where the detective did all the work for us and we just sat back and appreciated the mechanics. A film very much like Seven then, with its own type of abrasiveness.
This is Fincher's job in Hollywood, to be our current Billy Wilder. A perfectly efficient working hand who can subordinate himself to what a story demands so long as he gets a few spots to exercise his game.
Superficially the thing is written around three girls, each one coveted in some way and in turn some part missing.
One is the young heiress of the company and beloved sister long presumed dead and the trigger for our movie: we visit the place, a remote island with suspects arranged like pawns on a board game, and begin to unpack a narrative that happened long ago and is thought to reveal shady foundations of an entire Swedish society. Bits and pieces from photos are animated like films that we swoop in to follow; but disjointed or parts of a whole? And true as we see or misleading testimonies?
Another girl is the daughter, preppy beautiful and smart but apparently very religious. This is meant to baffle a little, as though something may be wrong with her. Daddy issues, we presume. But she gives us the one half of a clue that eventually clicks everything together; Bible quotes.
The other half of the clue - Jewish names, so possible Nazi involvement - we get from what is by now the most widely advertised aspect of the film. Another investigator but this time young, eccentric, visibly tormented but a sharp mind. Pierced through with pain from, you guessed it, daddy issues. Of course our man feeling guilty for not spending time with his daughter, he makes it up to this girl her age. We're meant to understand that she is very much the product of that first violence we are investigating, and having to grapple with gross but official injustice that still goes unpunished to this day.
So this is the thing that wraps the whole; each of these girls as a mirror to the others and all of them together a mirror of an abusive society. Simple but sold well. Designer hurt for the girl as a grownup's idea of what would appeal to a young demographic and on the other end contemporary political implications tied up with the one thing the Scandinavians have reason to be ashamed of - Nazi ties - to appeal to the parents. The writer has written himself in the thing as reflecting his own investigations in right-wing groups.
Now Fincher's game is usually a psychological dislocation diffused into the architecture; Pitt's house by the railroad tracks in Seven, the Narrator's house in Fight Club, the entire house with a hidden room and cameras everywhere in The Panic Room. Usually he weaves some dark fiction around this, gratuitous, eye-popping stuff, but he's at his most adept when evaluating human interiors in spatial terms.
I presumed here that a lot of power would be derived by the bridge setting, initially introduced as the main setting of a film-within. The complex of grey two-story homes. The main set-piece takes place in one, starting up and going down in the basement, but it's not a patch on the famous scene from Zodiac and is tritely resolved with a chase and a fireball. Nothing interesting to see, as it turns out. Maybe because Fincher is just a better filmmaker than the original writer is a writer.