The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Lisbeth Salander, with her bullring and black leather getup, makes Angelina Jolie look like a veritable beacon of gentle femininity. Apart from her subversive style and dramatic features, there’s something more to the heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the film of the same name and first cinematic installment based on Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy. 

In this surprisingly brutal murder mystery, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is a disturbed and reticent 24-year-old woman with a violent criminal history, who’s somehow found herself a job at a top security agency. Ostensibly, she’s a private investigator, but she’s also apparently trained in a variety of weapons maneuvers and an adept computer hacking sleuth to boot. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Lisbeth’s comparatively trepid male counterpart, has recently been found guilty of libel and dismissed from his post at Millennium magazine. Impressed by his reporting “persistence,” a rich elderly businessman (Sven-Bertil Taube) chooses Mikael to uncover the mystery surrounding his beloved niece’s disappearance forty years prior. Inexplicably, Mikael and Lisbeth find themselves working together to solve the case.

Though The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is entrancing, saturated with background detail and framed in an erotic hue, it doesn’t successfully amplify or encapsulate its literary namesake. We get a compelling and heartless heroine we can admire, but with whom we don’t want to identify given her violent tendencies. Lisbeth is incomplete, her stakes and motives never articulated. And the ending’s macabre twist has a sense of resolution to it, normally a positive, except that it produces no titillating desire to see what’s down the road for the investigatory duo.

Therein lies the problem of an adaptation obfuscated by perplexing background details that may have contributed substantially to the literature, but never fully coalesce in film. An American remake is rumored, and hopefully it can remedy this version’s shortcomings. Still, it’s unlikely to be as stylish or feature a heroine as ruthless—or finely cheekboned—as its Swedish counterpart.