Review:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Based on the best-selling novel by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first attempt to bring this complex crime thriller and its themes of sexual violence to the big screen. Shot in Swedish in the author’s home country by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, the film has received critical acclaim worldwide since its original release in February 2009.

The novel is a compelling read, but the plot is multi-layered, telling several different stories simultaneously from several different points of view. The film does a good job of sticking faithfully to this material, while paring it of some of the fat to provide a digestible cinematic experience. Not that the film is necessarily easy viewing, as the key theme of the book (and its two sequels) is the violence repeatedly expressed toward and enacted upon women by men. At one point in the story one of the characters is brutally beaten and raped, and although the scene is not graphically portrayed, it is a very uncomfortable scene for the audience nonetheless.

The political author and commentator Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist) is the first protagonist of the story. He is accused of libel by a major business magnate and loses the court case. He has an excuse to retreat from public life when he is approached by a retired millionaire Henrik Vanger, who has long been obsessed by the disappearance of his niece, Harriet, forty years ago. Vanger is approaching the end of his life and he contracts Blomkvist to look into the case one final time on his behalf.

Vanger goes on to explain that on the day of Harriet’s disappearance, all of their family were gathered on their island home, and they were trapped there for much of the day due to a road accident on the only bridge that connects the island to the mainland. He explains that he thinks Harriet was murdered, and that one of his own family was responsible. Thusly he presents a locked-room style scenario in which the number of possible perpetrators is finite, and every suspect is known. Although Blomkvist doesn’t believe that his own efforts would yield any more results than the ongoing investigations conducted by both the police and the family over the intervening 40 years, he agrees to try.