Distractions of Lola

review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a film that’s as much about solving a murder mystery as exploring the complexities and perversities of the human psyche. in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), an aging industrialist and family patriarch, continues to search for the murderer of his beloved niece Harriet who disappeared during a family gathering in 1964. Vanger believes a relative is responsible and hires tenacious but disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to investigate even though no one’s cracked the case in over 40 years. meanwhile, the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the girl with the dragon tattoo and vengeful cyberpunk angel if ever there was one, hacks her way into Mikael’s life and joins him as co-sleuth.

the biggest draw of the film is the stunning performance by Rapace as the pierced and inked badass computer virtuoso. at first, and by design, Lisbeth’s goth getup is off-putting and pretty ridiculous, so it’s to the actress’s credit that we quickly see beyond the facade and discover a brilliant but damaged young woman. and as brutal as her assault scene is, her post-rape moments are even more difficult and compelling because Rapace’s subtlety and realism never step into maudlin, victimized female territory. the current Gone With the Wind-esque search (and speculation) over who will be playing David Fincher’s Lisbeth in the American remake feels futile, because it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Rapace in those big bad combat boots.

director Niels Arden Oplev has crafted a riveting suspense thriller with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one that stays with you long after you’ve watched it. the main focus of the film is that of the gripping murder mystery, but it’s the other enigmas that really get under your skin: who is Lisbeth Salander? what kind of people are the Vangers? how dark and twisted can human nature get? why would anyone hack with a macbook? (ok, maybe not that last part, but it was a mystery to me). Oplev’s keen sense of editing unravels these mysteries bit by bit, layer by layer, and in the process, creates one of the cleverest and most memorable sequences in recent memory—Mikael scans a collection of photo negatives and plays them in series (like individual frames in a motion picture or gif) to study various angles and reconstruct a scene that leads to a break in the case. it’s a sequence that pays homage to Blow-Up and one in which Antonioni would be proud of.

while there’s really no need for a Let The Right One In remake (aka the other acclaimed Swedish film that’s getting the Hollywood treatment), i am looking forward to Fincher’s take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. for one thing, the story itself has elements of Se7en and Zodiac, so it’s already very much a Fincher film. and for such an engaging and well-made piece of cinema, the Swedish incarnation ends rather anticlimactically with a third act that runs too long as it wraps up various subplots. Fincher has recently cast Daniel Craig and Stellan Skarsgard as Mikael and Martin Vanger, respectively—so far so good. but if the wrong girl is cast for Lisbeth and the remake somehow turns into a complete shitfest, well, at least you’d have this amazing original to seek solace in.