It’s not often that I decide to see a movie on a whim, completely without any prior information or knowledge about it, who is in it and even its mere existence. Even more, I’m a spoiler whore – I can’t help but look up what the movie is about before I go see it. I recently received a lot of flak for reading the plot of Shutter Island on Wikipedia before going to see it.
This made my screening of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo especially entertaining. I had no idea what it was about or what was going to happen. What’s more, the movie was a twisting mystery, all the better to be pleasantly surprised by.
My reason for seeing the film? My grandmother, who read the bestselling novel the film is based on, told me that it was so gripping, she couldn’t put the book down. I found the movie similar in suspense: I almost didn’t want it to end, nearly three hours later, because the mystery was just so good.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts off as a run-of-the-mill mystery thriller. Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger, a family member in an illustrious Swedish family, mysteriously vanished. Every member of the family is a suspect in her disappearance. Her loving uncle receives framed pressed flowers anonymously once a year and believes that they are from Harriet’s murderer, taunting him.
He hires journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), on leave from his magazine after a libel scandal and awaiting a jail sentence, to help find out what exactly happened to Harriet. Blomkvist, in turn, hires the titular tattooed punk, Lisbeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace), a hacker with problems of her own.
Rapace is a stunning actress, with a haunting stare and a fierce determination rare in young actresses, while Nyqvist confidently carries the lead role on his shoulders.
The two form an unlikely yet charismatic detective duo. With Mikael’s journalistic skills and Lisbeth’s hacking abilities and photographic memory, the two discover that Harriet’s disappearance may have been because she discovered that one of her family members was a serial killer.
The movie is not for the faint of heart. First, it boasts a killer of a running time: over two-and-a-half hours. Secondly, what’s packed into this long duration is a mixture of rape, torture, anti-Semitism and various other squirm-inducing subjects. The villain, not revealed until the very end, is a particularly sick individual, taking pleasure in giving his victims hope for survival before then brutally murdering them.
Our heroine Lisbeth is forced to endure the majority of these horrors – while she is able to successfully seek revenge against her rapist (in a clever, “you go, girl!” sort of way), the camera painfully lingers on her rape. She receives the scorn from the majority of the characters, who treat her like a freak, with her multiple piercings, black lipstick, and waifish figure, as well as a somewhat-masculine attachment to her motorcycle. The movie has even been released in some American venues under the title Men Who Hate Women, if that is any indication as to what Lisbeth’s interactions with her male authority figures are like. When she and Mikael become lovers and come as close to happiness as she is willing to allow, it is almost a breath of fresh air to see someone treat her so well.
Mikael is a hero worthy of Agatha Christie mysteries; indeed, a scene where Mikael confronts the living members of the Vanger family to inform them that they are all suspects seems directly inspired by Christie’s Miss Marple. Connected to the Vanger family from his childhood, Mikael is willing to put his life at risk to uncover the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance.
Since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish film, it may not be able to attract a wide American audience. Indeed, it’s not even a movie that’s been marketed in my direction – I had to find it myself. Its length and disturbing subject matter might even turn some moviegoers off.
David Fincher has very recently been hired to direct an upcoming English-language remake of the film. While I trust Fincher’s abilities to direct disturbing material for the screen (he was the hand behind Seven, after all), my worry is that the movie will be excessively tamed for its American audiences.
Regardless of its harsh material, the Swedish original is a fantastically taut thriller, complete with frustrating mysteries and clever twists and turns. Even better, the movie’s two sequels – The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – have already been filmed and released in Europe.
I highly recommend The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, both because it is an excellent work of mystery and because if enough people see it, then perhaps the sequels will become more readily available over here.
