The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män som hatar kvinnor] (***½)

Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev

Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Ingvar Hirdwall, Björn Granath, Peter Andersson, Lena Endre

Seen: October 23^rd 2010

***½ Out of ****

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a rare beast. It takes two very broken people, one more so than the other, and manages to make the viewer root for them while they try to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

Mikael Blomkvist (Nyqvist) is an investigative reporter with Millennium magazine found guilty of libel against Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, for which he is sentenced to three months in jail. In conjunction with this he is under investigation by a hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Rapace), delivering her report on him to Dirch Frode (Hirdwall), a lawyer for the Vanger Group.

Mikael has six months before his sentence starts and is approached by Henrik Vanger (Taube) to solve the case of the disappearance of his niece 40 years earlier, a case which the police under Inspector Morell (Granath) could never solve. As he starts digging into evidence and historical record to try and find the truth, he hits many more dead ends than he does helpful leads. He’s also still being investigated by Lisbeth, and when she emails him a solution to a lead he was unsuccessfully investigating, he tracks her down, and the two start working together.

Lisbeth is by no means a balanced human being, a 24-year old social outcast, face full of piercings, tattooed to the hilt, and presentable only in gothic nightclubs. She was released into general society under the condition that she has a guardian, and when her guardian dies of a stroke, she is assigned a new one, Bjurman (Andersson), who abuses her cruelly. He has her perform sexual favours to get to her own money, and even that spirals out of control soon enough, leaving Lisbeth as a broken individual who gravitates towards Mikael, who treats her with common decency and respect.

The two leads share a cottage on the island where Harriet Vanger disappeared to be close to the Vanger family, of whom Henrik suspect at least one for Harriet’s vanishing. Henrik had 3 brothers, of who two have died while the third lives a reclusive and hermetic life. Harriet’s brother Martin (Haber) and his wife Erika (Endre) also live on the island, and are very hospitable towards Mikael.

What makes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo very refreshing is that the investigative tale told doesn’t feel contrived, the unfolding of the case is completely realistic and even inventive, unlike so many investigative stories lately with deliberate plot-twisting to attempt to keep viewers guessing – you share Mikael and Lisbeth’s frustration with some leads coming so close but turning out cold.

The movie will definitely upset sensitive viewers, as there are rather extreme (it matters not that the worst parts are off screen, the effects are brutally clear and visible) sequences of sadism and cruel human behaviour; Bjurman rapes Lisbeth, for instance, her struggle is heard and she is shown in utter discomfort afterwards, limping home to where she whimpers in pain as she sits down. The murders are also rather grotesque, even though they are mostly from historical case files.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a very good investigative film with three dimensional characters in Mikael and especially in Lisbeth – a testament to the human spirit of not giving up in the direst of circumstance. The last 10 to 20 minutes of the movie are especially powerful, as the two leads are humanised even further, and I can’t wait to see what the following two films in this trilogy based on the late Stieg Larsson’s books hold.